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Class PR r0 3 
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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



INTRODUCTIONS TO 
NOTABLE POEMS 



JSoofesf tip Mv. iWatJie 

My Study Fire 

My Study Fire, Second Series 

Under the Trees and Elsewhere 

Short Studies in Literature 

Essays in Literary Interpretation 

Essays on Nature and Culture 

Essays on Books and Culture 

Essays on Work and Culture 

The Life of the Spirit 

Norse Stories 

William Shakespeare 

Works and Days 

Parables of Life 

The Great Word 

In the Forest of Arden. Illustrated 

Under the Trees. Illustrated 

A Child of Nature. Illustrated 

In Arcady. Illustrated 

Christmas Today 

Introductions to Notable Poems 





^m. 



INTRODUCTIONS 

TO NOTABLE 

POEMS 



BY 



HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 



ILLUSTRATED 





NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1909 

A 








Copyright, iQog 
By The Outlook Company 

Copyright J igog 
By Dodd, Mead and Company 

Published, October, 1909 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



ii^CI.A251l8^ 




INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

NO one who knows and loves 
English poetry can fail to re- 
gret that so many cultivated readers 
have turned away from a fountain of 
refreshment so abundant, and that so 
many other readers, who would find 
delight in poetry if they knew it well, 
are leaving out of their lives so power- 
ful an influence against the materi- 
alizing tendency of the age. The 
selection of poetry presented in this 
volume has no more ambitious pur- 
pose than to bring together in con- 
venient form a small body of verse 
in English of the highest quality ; 



Introductory Note 

verse which appeals with equal force 
to those whose prime interest is in 
perfection of form and to those to 
whom poetry is the inevitable lan- 
guage of the human spirit in its mo- 
ments of exaltation. No attempt has 
been made to give the selection a 
representative character other than 
that secured by bringing together the 
different verse forms ; and even in 
this respect the choice has only fol- 
lowed the line of the most beautiful 
and memorable poetry. In the In- 
troductions the endeavor has been 
made to set the poems in their en- 
vironment, so to speak, by sketching 
briefly the development of the poem 
and pf the poet ; by bringing together 
the facts which throw light on the 
making of the poem ; and by point- 
ing out the characteristic qualities 
not only of the selections but of 
vi 



Introductory Note 

the verse forms of which they are 
examples. 

The Introductions are reprinted 
by the courtesy of the Outlook. 



vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



^/Robert Burns Frontispl 



^JPercy Bysshe Shelley . . Fact 
"* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 
^/William Wordsworth . 
-^Edgar Allan Poe . . . 

' John Keats 

^ Walter Savage Landor . 
^ Robert Herrick .... 
" Richard Lovelace . 
/William Shakespeare . . 



tece 
ng page 34 

5^ 
68 

86 

lOO 

114 
136 

140 
186 



A number of the illustrations in this 
book are used through the courtesy 
of The Outlook Company. 



INTRODUCTIONS TO 
NOTABLE POEMS 



THE BLESSED DAMOSEL 

WHAT is known as the Pre- 
Raphaelite movement in 
English art was one of those events 
which discredit abstract theories of 
racial development and make broad 
and dogmatic generalization a vain 
show. For in the very heart of a cen- 
tury surrendered, according to its crit- 
ics, to materialism and in a country 
devoted to trade, a fountain of fresh 
feeling for religion and art suddenly 
gushed out of the soil ; and wonder, 
which was officially declared to be 
dead in an age of shop-keeping, had 
a new rebirth. The names of New- 
man, Keble, Pugin, Hunt, Millais, 
Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Brown, Ros- 
I 



The Blessed Damosel 

setti, recall a sudden splendor flung 
on the commonplace life of the middle 
of the last century. The reaction 
against the tyranny of the fact which 
always sets in after a long abstinence 
from the things of the imagination, 
a long indifference to the instinctive 
romanticism of the spirit in the great 
adventure of life, was never more 
radical and daring than in the band 
of ardent young men who formed 
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 
1848 ; chief among whom, from the 
standpoint of literary achievement, 
was the author of " The Blessed 
Damosel." 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was three 
fourths Italian and one fourth Eng- 
lish in blood. His father was an ex- 
ile, a scholar, translator, and teacher ; 
his sister Maria Francesca wrote " A 
Shadow of Dante," which Lowell 



The Blessed Damosel 

regarded as the best comment in 
English on the Florentine poet; his 
sister Christina wrote many poems 
of notable intensity of feeling and 
richness of diction; his brother 
William Michael wrote prose and 
verse of highly individual quality. 
It was a rarely gifted group of chil- 
dren who grew up in the Rossetti 
home, in an atmosphere charged 
with intellectual energy and vitality. 
Before most English boys of his time 
had learned to read Dante Gabriel 
knew the story of " Hamlet," and 
Dante was an overshadowing pres- 
ence in the home and deeply affected 
the sensitive imaginations of a house- 
hold domesticated in London but 
breathing the spiritual air of Italy. 
The future painter and poet studied 
Latin, French, and German in King's 
College school ; Italian was his 
3 



The Blessed Damosel 

mother tongue quite as much as 
English. In his fourteenth year his 
vocation was already pressing home 
its claims in his temperament and 
genius and he exchanged the study 
of languages for that of art ; after a 
short stay in the Royal Academy An- 
tique School he entered the studio of 
Maddox Brown, and made the ac- 
quaintance of the young men with 
whom he was to cast in his fortunes 
as a painter. In his nineteenth year 
he was a poet as well as a painter ; 
and " The Blessed Damosel " must 
be counted one of the most original 
and beautiful of the early fruits of 
genius. It appeared in 1850 in the 
" Germ," a magazine which bore 
much the same relation to Pre- 
Raphaelism that the " Dial " bore to 
Transcendentalism. The " Germ " 
was a small and rather shabby publi- 

4 



The Blessed Damosel 

cation, judged by the typographical 
standards of to-day, but the air of 
the morning exhaled from its pages, 
and behind it was a brilliant fellow- 
ship of young and ardent minds 
bent on bringing beauty back to its 
rightful place in the modern world. 
They revolted against the com- 
monplace temper and conventional 
methods of the English painters of 
the time ; they scorned anecdotal 
and story-telling pictures ; they in- 
sisted on high themes seriously 
treated ; they were bent on keeping 
spiritual intention, veracity of detail, 
and freedom and courage in coloring 
in harmony ; and they followed 
beauty with passionate devotion for 
its own sake. They did not go as 
far as in the ardent dreams of their 
youth they hoped ; but they en- 
riched English painting with splen- 

5 



The Blessed Damosel 

dor of Imagination, they redeemed 
it from conventionality, and they 
brought back that feeling of wonder 
which is the response of the quick- 
ened imagination to the changing, 
many-hued pageant of life. 

Rossetti's work as a painter forms 
a chapter by itself; his work as a 
poet may be briefly told. A decade 
after the appearance of " The Blessed 
Damosel " his volumes of transla- 
tions, " The Early Italian Poets " 
and " Dante and His Circle,'' ap- 
peared and made the world aware 
of his extraordinary gifts as an in- 
terpreter of the Italian spirit and 
genius. At the end of another de- 
cade, in 1870, the "Poems" were 
issued, and at once established the 
fame of Rossetti as a poet of excep- 
tional richness of imagination and 
picturesqueness of diction. They 

6 



The Blessed Damosel 

did not find a place in Victorian 
poetry without challenge, however; 
the sensuous note in them evoked 
a savage attack from Robert Bu- 
chanan, who grossly overstated his 
case and later acknowledged that he 
had been led into a serious injustice. 
Rossetti was sensuous, and in a few 
instances more frank than the reti- 
cences of nature or art permit, but 
he was not " fleshly." After another 
interval of ten years " Ballads and 
Sonnets " was published ; and in the 
spring of the following year, 1882, 
the poet died. 

Rossetti was successful in three 
difficult verse forms : he was a bal- 
ladist of striking energy of imagina- 
tion and pictorial power, and " Sister 
Helen," " Rose Mary," " The White 
Ship," and the " King's Tragedy," 
must be counted among the sub- 

7 



The Blessed Damosel 

stantial modern achievements In this 
kind of verse. He was also a son- 
neteer of very high rank, and " The 
House of Life," by reason of its 
splendor of imagery and cadenced 
music, puts him in the companion- 
ship, if not with Shakespeare and 
Milton and Wordsworth, certainly 
with Keats and Mrs. Browning. 
He was also a master of the lyric, 
stamping it with a quality at once 
Individual and poignantly beauti- 
ful. "The Sea Limits," "A Last 
Confession," " Troy Town," " The 
Burden of Nineveh," and "The 
Woodspurge," — that masterpiece of 
exact observation — "The Stream's 
Secret," with its slow-moving music, 
bring out the subtlety of percep- 
tion, the penetrating imagination, 
the sensuous beauty of diction of a 
poet in whom the English and Ital- 

8 



The Blessed Damosel 

ian strains were blended. " The 
Blessed Damosel " is not only Eng- 
lish and Italian, but bears the touch 
of the painter as distinctly as of the 
artist. It is as deeply tinged with 
the romantic spirit as the " Eve of 
St. Agnes," but it has a magic all 
its own ; a glow and boldness of de- 
scription, a fervor of feeling, a blend- 
ing of vision and sensuous imagery 
which give it a captivating spell. 
Even the immaturity which shows 
itself in construction and diction em- 
phasizes the mingled sense of some- 
thing remote and celestial with the 
familiar and human which gives this 
lyric a touch of mystery ; the warmth 
of passion traversing the gulfs of space 
and imparting, with the aid of a charm- 
ing archaicism of style and a daring 
concreteness of description, the beauty 
of reality to a dream of heaven. 

9 



The Blessed Damosel 

Rossetti is not of the elect com- 
pany of poets who " see life steadily 
and see it whole " ; his passionate 
interest was in beauty, which he 
conceived in the mystical Platonic 
sense ; he had a fancy rich, rather 
than delicate, an opulent and vivid 
imagination, a rare power of bringing 
remote and elusive conceptions near 
by unflinching sensuousness of im- 
agery and diction. A sense of won- 
der penetrates his best work, and 
that haunting sense of pathos which 
is the shadow of beauty in the world ; 
and he was a subtle master of the 
technique of verse-making. He is 
a lonely figure, with the strangeness 
of exile on him ; there was some- 
thing esoteric in his genius, and the 
shadow of fate was on his life. 



lO 



THE BANKS O' BOON AND 
FOR A' THAT AND A' THAT 

AT the end of a hundred and fifty 
years after the birth of Robert 
Burns it is safe to assume that in his 
case the account which the world 
keeps with its men of genius has 
been made up and closed ; and the 
reputation which followed fast upon 
the publication of that unpretentious 
volume of poems at Kilmarnock in 
1786 has deepened and widened into 
a great and lasting fame. His con- 
fused and tragically broken life has 
not been forgotten; but those whose 
first impulse is to build monuments 
to righteousness by stoning sinners 

have been arrested by the pathos of 
II 



The Banks o' Doon and 

the struggle between Burns*s soaring 
imagination and his sordid needs, 
between his powerful passions and 
the painfully narrow horizons of his 
situation. There has been no futile 
and immortal endeavor to hide the 
bare and repulsive facts in his career ; 
but there has been, even among hard- 
ened Pharisees, a recognition of a 
moral problem too complicated for 
the touch-and-go judgments of those 
inferior courts whose opinions are 
often mere records of the blindness 
of human understanding. Burns 
made grievous mistakes in the direc- 
tion of his life and paid heavily in 
health, art, and reputation ; he had 
also great and generous qualities of 
nature, an innate nobility of spirit 
sometimes obscured but never oblit- 
erated, and a genius for making the 
heart speak which has given him 

12 



For a' That and a That 

access to the homes of the English- 
speaking world. 

With Shakespeare and Lincoln, 
he has been haled into the court of 
public opinion as a witness to the 
fallacy that genius supersedes educa- 
tion and that to those whose lips 
have been touched by the divine fire 
no training is necessary. It hap- 
pens that each of these apparent ex- 
ceptions to the rule that nothing 
great and enduring is ever done 
without some form of preparation 
had the best of luck in specific train- 
ing for his particular work. Burns 
was singularly fortunate in finding 
early precisely the material vitally 
adapted to his genius ; and this was 
true of Shakespeare and Lincoln as 
well. 

It is true, Burns was born in a 
cottage built of clay, on the side of 
13 



The Banks o' Doon and 

the road that runs from Ayr to the 
bridge of Doon, past the ruin of 
" Allovvay's auld haunted Kirk " ; that 
a few days after his birth a wild Jan- 
uary storm blew down a gable of the 
house and in a bleak dawn he was 
carried to a neighbor's for shelter — 

" A blast o* Janwar' win' 

Blew hansel in on Robin ; " 

that his father was a kind of peasant 
farmer, of a noble rectitude, a spirited 
temper, and a devout spirit, who, for 
all his force, was bitterly beaten in 
the fight for comfort ; that his school 
life, begun at the age of five, was 
soon over, and that for him the road 
ended where it usually begins for 
boys of easier condition. 

These are, however, the accidents 
of condition ; education is a matter 
of vitalization, inspiration, nourish- 
H 



For a' That and a' That 

ment ; and all these fell to the lot of 
Burns. He had rare teachers in 
those years when real teachers plant 
deep in a rich soil, and one of these 
was his father. Robert and his 
brother Gilbert not only learned 
many facts about the world, but were 
taught to see and think ; they were 
especially drilled by a country school- 
master of uncommon sense in the 
use of words, their meaning, their 
order, their simple and their poetic 
uses ; and no small part of Burns's 
achievement was his magical skill in 
making plain words serve the highest 
uses of the imagination. In, the years 
when a child's nature lies open to 
every influence like an unshaded 
field, the gentle Ayrshire lass who 
was his mother poured into him a 
wealth of Scotch poetry in songs, 
ballads, legends, history — the very 
15 



The Banks o* Doon and 

stuff of which poetry is made. There 
were a few books in the house of the 
right sort at a time when books were 
held in great honor : lives of Wallace 
and other Scotch heroes. The Spec- 
tator, a few of Shakespeare's plays. 
Pope's translation of Homer; a few 
books which supplied the intellectual 
gymnastic which has given the mind 
of Scotland such vigorous fiber — 
Locke on " The Human Under- 
standing," Boyle's Lectures, treatises 
on theology dear to the Scottish 
heart ; and, above all, a collection of 
songs. " I pored over them driving 
my cart," wrote Burns, " or walking 
to labor, song by song, verse by verse, 
carefully noting the true, tender, or 
sublime, from affectation and fustian. 
I am convinced I owe to this prac- 
tice much of my critic-craft, such as 
it is." After a generation's experi- 

i6 



For a' That and a* That 

ment in trying to teach literature by 
text-book, chart, blackboard, dictated 
exercise, daily theme, recitation, and 
lecture, not a few unhappy instruc- 
tors in English are asking if the path 
Burns took is not the best path to 
that love of literature which is the 
beginning of the knowledge of it. 

Moreover, they were a reading 
family on the upland farm at Mount 
Oliphant; one who came upon them 
at meal-time found them equipped 
with a spoon in one hand and a book 
in the other ! Here was a school of 
a freshness and inspiration which 
rarely opens to the boy of genius ; 
and they are fortunate who, like 
Goethe and Burns, have the gates 
of the world of poetry flung wide by 
the hands of a mother ! Blessed are 
the children born to the undefiled 
and indestructible heritage of poetry 
a 17 



The Banks o' Doon and 

and to the familiar and habitual use 
of the imagination which is the joy 
of life in an age which tries to live 
by reason ; as if the imagination were 
not the faculty of vision that carries 
reason on to the ultimate truths ! 

To these deep and fertilizing in- 
fluences preparing the poet for his 
work must be added the inspiring 
atmosphere of Scotland, a country 
set immovably on the sternest reali- 
ties, and yet never enslaved by them ; 
poor, but free ; practical of hand, 
loyal of heart, never without that 
gift of second sight which is one of 
the resources of a great temperament. 
Under the rugged soil of this rain- 
swept and sea-encircled land run 
quiet streams of sentiment, silent 
rivers of poetry, which rise out of a 
heroic past, a noble history of " lost 
causes and impossible loyalties,*' a 
?3 



For SL That and a' That 

profound religious experience, half a 
thousand years' intimacy with some 
of the greatest poetry in literature, 
a strain of that mysticism which is 
the gift of poets and prophets and 
artists. Better a thousand times this 
irregular education which liberates 
and inspires than the dull way of 
mechanically directed schools and of 
those colleges that train the under- 
standing and leave the creative faculty 
to get its education as best it can 1 

Burns was to deal, not with the 
rich results of thought, as Tennyson 
did, nor with the splendid play of per- 
sonality daring to believe in its right 
and power, as Browning did, nor was 
he to record the reaction of knowl- 
edge upon faith, as Arnold did ; his 
business lay with the human heart 
and its elemental passions, with those 
great strains of independence, self- 
'9 



The Banks o* Doon and 

reliance, and indifference to the badges 
of success, the external signs of 
power. He became the poet of the 
Scotch fireside and of the sturdy- 
Scotch integrity ; the most intimate 
singer the Scotch have ever known, 
and the dearest ; the most outspoken 
singer of essential manhood, who has 
set the very soul of democracy to 
music. He was strongest when his 
feet were on the ground of simple 
emotions in the simplest speech ; his 
art was weak only when he yielded 
to the influence of a sophisticated 
society. He was a plowman, and 
it was in the fields that he found 
the " Wee, modest, crimson-tipped 
flower," and the " Wee, sleekit, 
cow'rin *, tim'rous beastie '' ; it was in 
little houses of clay that he saw the 
tender and beautiful drama of the 
family in "The Cottar's Saturday 
20 



For a* That and a' That 

Night " ; it was out of such homes 
that Mary Morison, Highland Mary, 
and Nannie came ; it was at the way- 
side inn, on the lonely country road, 
and in the remote kirk that he found 
"Tam o* Shanter," *'Holy Willie's 
Prayer," keen to the edge of irrever- 
ence with biting irony, the " Address 
to the Deil," "The Holy Fair"; 
it was out of the very heart of Scot- 
land that " Auld Lang Syne," " John 
Anderson, My Jo," "O Wert Thou 
in the Cauld Blast," and " A Man's 
a Man for a' That " issued like deep 
streams flowing from hidden foun- 
tains. No one can understand Scot- 
land who reads the formal histories 
and leaves these intimate confessions 
of the soul out of account. 

Burns had wonderful fidelity to 
life in detail, and wonderful freshness 
in giving detail lifelikeness ; he had 

21 



The Banks o' Doon and 

the largeness and freedom of a power- 
ful intellect, and he had the fierce 
and at times reckless energy of a 
great but imperfectly controlled per- 
sonality. When he sings of the equal- 
ity and dignity of man as man, he 
strikes notes which have reverberated 
through the English-speaking world ; 
when he sings of the sorrow and sweet- 
ness of the Scotch home, or the ten- 
derness akin to sadness of love, he 
touches the hidden sources of smiles 
and tears ; when he gives his genius 
for touching life on the quick, his 
rollicking and audacious humor, his 
fresh and vital diction, free rein, as 
in " Tam o^ Shanter " and " The Jolly 
Beggars," he achieves, as Matthew 
Arnold has said, "superb poetic suc- 
cess." But Burns is dear to us most 
of all in "Auld Lang Syne," in 
" Duncan Gray," in " Whistle an' 

22 



For a' That and a' That 

I Ml Come to You, My Lad," and a 
dozen other poems compounded of 
the very stuff of the poetry which 
once heard lingers in the ear and 
lives in the heart ; a tenderness akin 
to tears, piercing pathos, sparkling 
wit, a manner at once intimate and 
masterful, a sense of human fate ap- 
pealingly tragic or touched as by a 
wing astray from heaven. 

FOR A' THAT AND A' THAT 

Is there for honest poverty 

Wha hings his head, and a' that ? 
The coward slave, we pass him by — 

We dare be poor for a* that ! 
For a' that an' a' that, 

Our toils obscure, and a' that, 
The rank is but the guinea's stamp. 

The man 's the gowd for a' that. 

What though on hamely fare we dine, 
Wear hoddin gray, and a' that ? 
23 



The Banks o' Doon and 

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their 
wine — 

A man 's a man for a' that. 
For a' that an' a* that, 

Their tinsel show, an' a' that, 
The honest man, though e'er sae poor. 

Is king o' men for a' that. 

Ye see yon birkie ca'd " a lord," 

Wha struts, an' stares, and a' that ? 
Though hundreds worship at his word, 

He 's but a cuif for a' that. 
For a' that and a' that. 

His ribband, star, and a' that. 
The man of independent mind. 

He looks an' laughs at a' that. 

A prince can mak' a belted knight, 

A marquis, duke, an' a' that ; 
But an honest man 's aboon his might — 

Guid faith, he mauna fa' that ! 
For a' that an' a' that. 

Their dignities, and a' that. 
The pith o' sense and pride o' worth 

Are higher rank than a' that. 
24 



For a* That and a* That 

Then let us pray that come it may 

(As come it will for a' that) 
That Sense and Worth o'er a* the earth 

Shall bear the gree an' a' that ! 
For a' that an' a' that, 

It 's comin' yet for a' that, 
When man to man the world o'er 

Shall brithers be for a' that. 

THE BANKS O' DOON 

Ye banks and braes o* bonnie Doon, 

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair ? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds. 

And I sae weary, fu' o' care ? 
Thou 'It break my heart, thou warbling 
bird. 

That wantons through the flowering 
thorn ! 
Thou minds me o' departed joys, 

Departed never to return. 

Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon 

To see the rose and woodbine twine ; 

And ilka bird sang o' its luve. 
And fondly sae did I o' mine, 

25 



The Banks o* Doon 

Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, 
Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree I 

And my fause luver staw my rose — 
But ah ! he left the thorn wi' me. 



26 



TO A SKYLARK 

SHELLEY was a child of the 
Revolution and became its 
prophet ; hence the extraordinary 
hold of his verse on later genera- 
tions ; hence also the wide divergence 
of opinion regarding the poet and the 
man. He had the spirit of a child 
— joy in nature, faith in impulse, 
guileless belief in men ; a kind of 
radiant lawlessness that made the 
universe the playground of its im- 
agination and artlessly re-formed it 
as if it were plastic to the hand. He 
had the mind of the prophet — intent 
on the realization of certain passion- 
ately held convictions and with an 
indifference to actualities that effaced 
27 



To a Skylark 

them. There are those who love 
him as a pure, unworldly, disinter- 
ested spirit, filled with an unquench- 
able hatred of tyranny and an ardent 
love of men ; and these things are 
true of him. There are those who 
think of him as a moral anarchist, a 
law-breaker, and a violator of the 
sanctity of the home ; and these 
things are also true of him. Clearly, 
here is a case not so much for charity 
as for the largest view of human re- 
sponsibility. 

Shelley had a most unfortunate 
parentage; his grandfather was an ad- 
venturer who had led a shadowy 
career in this country, and later laid 
the foundations of a substantial estate 
in England by eloping with two heir- 
esses. His father was a well-meaning, 
conventional, and stupid person, with 
as little comprehension of his son's 
28 



To a Skylark 

temperament and genius as an owl 
has of the aerial instincts and ethereal 
singing qualities of the skylark. 
" Tamed by affection but uncon- 
quered by blows," the sensitive boy 
found himself in the guardianship of 
a father who believed that men of 
his son's position in English society 
could be made as dull and externally 
respectable as himself by arbitrary 
authority. Timothy Shelley was of 
the earth, earthy, and his morals had 
no deeper rootage than social custom. 
He found his view of life adequately 
expressed by Lord Chesterfield, 
whose style he Imitated in his letters ; 
he held himself securely based on 
fundamental principles, while " the 
exalted mind of the Duke of Norfolk 
protects me with the world " ; and he 
was ready to provide for as many 
illegitimate children as his son chose 
29 



To a Skylark 

to bring into the world, but a mesalli- 
ance he would not condone ! Shelley 
was unfortunate also in his friends; 
they were mainly, to put it in plain 
English, a bad lot ; it was not that 
they were unconventional in morals 
as well as in habits of life, but they 
were sordid, selfish, without a keen 
sense of honor or delicacy of feeling. 
Matthew Arnold speaks of " God- 
win's house of sordid horror," and it 
must be confessed that the spectacle 
of Godwin preaching freedom from 
all social and family ties as the evi- 
dence of the emancipated spirit, and 
Godwin continually borrowing money 
and making shift to live on his 
friends, is a sorry spectacle. Hogg 
had his good points, but was sus- 
pected of treachery in the house of 
his friend ; and the tawdry selfish- 
ness of Bvron is relieved mainly by 
30 



To a Skylark 

his recognition of the unselfishness 
of Shelley. Of the Westbrooks, the 
unfortunate Harriet, who had a brief 
happiness with Shelley, bore him two 
children, lived unhappily through a 
few months of separation and then 
drowned herself, is the only tolerable 
human being. The story of these 
emancipated spirits is so unwholesome 
and repellent that it almost reconciles 
one to the Philistinism of the conven- 
tionally respectable. Shelley, whose 
spirit was compounded of fire and 
mist, of soaring aspiration and impa- 
tience with every kind of restraint, 
was as a shining angel in this motley 
company. 

The young poet's characterization 
of his father was unpardonable; but 
the father had done all that lay in a 
man's power to break the parental tie, 
and to irritate, humiliate, and blast 
31 



To a Skylark 

the reputation of his son. Shelley 
has been held in abhorrence as an 
atheist by a host of people. At 
Oxford, where he saturated himself 
with Hume, he wrote a pamphlet on 
"The Necessity of Atheism," sent 
copies to the Vice-Chancellor and 
heads of the houses, and was 
promptly expelled. Later he wrote 
" Queen Mab,'* at the mature age 
of eighteen. These performances 
made an immense local sensation and 
put his name permanently on the 
black list. People did not realize, 
apparently, that he was a boy in 
years ; nor did they understand that 
he never really came in contact with 
God at all. He was raging against 
an irresponsible, tyrannical, incredible 
deity who bore as little resemblance 
to the God of the New Testament as 
did Baal or Moloch. So far as this 
32 



To a Skylark 

aspect of Shelley^s career was con- 
cerned, it is not too much to say that 
it was the dawning of the true God- 
idea in his mind that set him in 
battle against the tribal God of a 
partialistic and dying theology. 
" Change the namcy' said Robertson, 
one of the most saintly spirits of our 
time, " and I will bid that character 
defiance with you." 

The real stain on Shelley's fame is 
his separation from Harriet West- 
brook and his " free-union " with 
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. This 
act, which inevitably brought tragic 
consequences in its train, is not to 
be justified on any ground ; but while 
it cannot be condoned, it can be ex- 
plained. In Shelley's revolt against 
what he believed to be the tyranny 
and injustice of society he rejected 
legal marriage as a form of conven- 
3 II 



To a Skylark 

tional slavery for women, the source 
of many oppressive and unjust laws. 
In this position there is no doubt of 
his entire sincerity ; it was a moral 
conviction, not a disguised plea for 
license. Mr. Woodberry puts the 
case admirably when he says, " The 
belief of Shelley in love without mar- 
riage was an extreme way of stating 
his disbelief in marriage without love." 
So deep and so sincere was his horror 
of a legal relation without the justifi- 
cation of love that he disowned the 
relation itself. When he left Harriet, 
he explained his position to her with 
entire frankness, and made provision 
for her support ; he went to Switzer- 
land with Mary Godwin, who had 
derived the same indifference to mar- 
riage from her parents, and he had 
the incredibly bad taste to invite 
Harriet to join them there ! AH 
3+ 



To a Skylark 

this was in entire harmony with 
Shelley *s principles, but entirely out 
of harmony with the moral order of 
life, in defiance of fundamental social 
law, and in violation of sane human 
feelings. 

Shelley's career is a striking illus- 
tration not only of the futility but 
of the immorality of shaping life by 
impulse, however noble, without ref- 
erence to actual conditions. This 
world is not only an idea but a reality ; 
it has not only a spirit but a body ; 
and health, sanity, and freedom are 
found only in submitting the impulse 
to law and bringing the abstract idea 
into working relations with realities. 
Shelley was a spirit of singular gener- 
osity and unselfishness, but he fell 
into the slough of lawlessness, be- 
cause he disregarded the twofold 
relations of the human soul. He 
35 



To a Skylark 

understood this more clearly than 
some of his unwise apologists : " You 
might as well go to a ginshop for a 
leg of mutton as expect anything hu- 
man or earthly from me." This was 
not only a very shrewd piece of per- 
sonal comment ; it was also an illum- 
inating piece of literary criticism, 
and touches the fundamental defect 
of his work : its lack of reality. What- 
ever we are to become in the future, 
it is quite certain that we get our 
growth and fulfill our destiny here 
and now only by being thoroughly 
human ; this is the quality of Homer 
and Shakespeare. Shelley often seems 
like a disembodied spirit unable to 
establish working relations with actu- 
alities, and so to gain the perception 
of truth which comes only as the re- 
sult of experience ; he was sometimes 
unmoral because morality — the real 
36 



To a Skylark 

and enduring order of things — is 
possible only when the spirit under- 
stands and accepts the conditions on 
which all sound and sweet human 
relationships are based. 

Shelley left England for the last 
time in the early spring of the year 
1818, went first to Milan, and later, 
after various changes of residence, 
settled at Pisa, or in its neighborhood. 
These closing years, though not with- 
out shadows, were probably the hap- 
piest in his troubled life. They were 
also the most fruitful in work of last- 
ing value and growing maturity. To 
this period belong the " CEdipus Tyr- 
annus," " Hellas," the " Epipsychi- 
dion," that poignantly beautiful elegy 
the " Adonais," the "Sensitive Plant," 
the Odes. On July 8, 1822, he was 
lost in a sudden tempest in the Gulf 
of Spezia. 

37 



To a Skylark 

The " Ode to a Skylark " was one 
of a brood of aerial poems which 
seemed to ascend out of his glowing 
imagination as the skylarks sometimes 
mount to the upper sky in quick 
succession when the July heat shim- 
mers over English fields. This Ode, 
with those to Liberty and Naples, 
sounded new notes in English litera- 
ture. Their eloquence and mount- 
ing music reveal Shelley*s winged 
imagination, which was at home only 
in the sky. He was akin with the 
elements, the air, the sky, the ocean ; 
a fiery ardor burned in his veins, and 
in his great moments he was like 
an old poet possessed by the gods. 
There was something mysterious and 
incalculable in his genius ; something 
divinely beautiful in his nature and 
his poetry. " There was a softness, a 
delicacy, a gentleness, and especially 
38 



To a Skylark 

(though this will surprise many) that 
air of profound religious veneration 
that characterizes the best works and 
chiefly the frescoes (and into these 
they infused their whole souls) of the 
great masters of Florence and Rome/* 
were Hogg*s words in describing the 
expression of Shelley*s face. 

He was the child of the Revolution 
in his fierce hatred of tyranny, his 
passionate sense of injustice, and in the 
lawless assertion of his own will ; he 
was the prophet of the later and 
deeper movement for the liberation 
of humanity in his sense of human 
brotherhood, his instinctive espousal 
of the common fortunes of humanity, 
his ardent love of freedom. 



39 



To a Skylark 

TO A SKYLARK 

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit ! 

Bird thou never wert, 
That from heaven, or near it, 
Pourest thv full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest, 
Like a cloud of fire, 

The blue deep thou wingest. 
And singing still dost soar, and soaring 
ever singest. 

In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun 
O'er which clouds are brightening. 
Thou dost float and run. 
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just 
begun. 

The pale purple even 

Melts around thy flight; 
Like a star of heaven 
40 



To a Skylark 

In the broad daylight 
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill 
delight : 

Keen as are the arrows 

Of that silver sphere, 
Whose intense lamp narrows 

In the white dawn clear 
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. 

All the earth and air 

With thy voice is loud, 
As, when night is bare. 
From one lonely cloud 
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven 
is overflow'd. 

What thou art we know not ; 

What is most like thee ? 
From rainbow clouds there flow not 
Drops so bright to see 
As from thy presence showers a rain of 
melody ; — 

Like a poet hidden 

In the light of thought, 

41 



To a Skylark 

Singing hymns unbidden, 
Till the world is wrought 
To sympathy with hopes and fears it 
heeded not : 

Like a high-born maiden 

In a palace tower, 
Soothing her love-laden 
Soul in secret hour 
With music sweet as love, which overflows 
her bower : 

Like a glow-worm golden 

In a dell of dew. 
Scattering unbeholden 
Its aerial hue 
Among the flowers and grass, which screen 
it from the view: 

Like a rose embower'd 

In its own green leaves, 
By warm winds deflower'd. 
Till the scent it gives 
Makes faint with too much sweet these 
heavy-winged thieves. 
42 



To a Skylark 

Sound of vernal showers 

On the twinkling grass, 
Rain-awaken'd flowers. 
All that ever was 
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music 
doth surpass. 

Teach us, sprite or bird. 

What sweet thoughts are thine : 

I have never heard 
Praise of love or wine 
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 

Chorus hymeneal 

Or triumphal chaunt 
Match'd with thine, would be all 
But an empty vaunt — 
A thing wherein we feel there is some 
hidden want. 

What objects are the fountains 

Of thy happy strain ? 
What fields, or waves, or mountains ? 
What shapes of sky or plain ? 
What love of thine own kind ? what igno- 
rance of pain ? 
43 



To a Skylark 

With thy clear keen joyance 

Languor cannot be : 
Shadow of annoyance 
Never came near thee : 
Thou lovest ; but ne'er knew love*s sad 
satiety. 

Waking or asleep 

Thou of death must deem 
Things more true and deep 
Than we mortals dream, 
Or how could thy notes flow in such a 
crystal stream ? 

We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not : 
Our sincerest laughter 

With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell 
of saddest thought. 

Yet if we could scorn 

Hate, and pride, and fear ; 

If we were things born 
Not to shed a tear, 

44 



To a Skylark 

I know not how thy joy we ever should 
come near. 

Better than all measures 

Of delightful sound, 
Better than all treasures 
That in books are found, 
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the 
ground ! 

Teach me half the gladness 

That thy brain must know, 
Such harmonious madness 
From my lips would flow. 
The world should listen then, as I am lis- 
tening now ! 



45 



SIX SONNETS FROM 
LONGFELLOW ' 

TO approach Longfellow, the 
most popular of American 
poets, as a sonneteer is to suggest the 
rectification of the order of excellence 
in which his poems have been placed, 
and to put at the front the work 
which makes his fame secure. A 
poet of grace and sentiment, a lover 
of the domestic virtues and endowed 
with that courage of affection born 
of simplicity and sincerity to which 
the cynics are strangers, the author 
of "The Voices of the Night" had 
the cup of popular applause held to 

* These sonnets are used by permission of, and by 
special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, 
the authorized publishers of Mr. Longfellow's works. 

+6 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

his lips early and late ; but although 
a scholar and the companion of 
scholars, and dear to not a few with 
whom the plaudits of the hour are 
counted things of naught, there were 
always dissenters and unbelievers 
among the critics, and his death was 
followed by a period of indifference or 
derogation. The over-praise and the 
under-valuation will be equally void 
of weight when the final summing 
up is made and the final judg- 
ment announced. Meantime Long- 
fellow will continue to be loved and 
memorized ; for he who sows year 
after year in the hearts of children 
will always reap an abundant harvest. 
Longfellow was not of the great 
ones ; nor, for that matter, are the 
vast majority of the singers whom 
the world has agreed not to forget. 
He wrote a good deal of rhymed 
47 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

commonplace ; and so, for that mat- 
ter, did Wordsworth, Byron, Schiller, 
Whittier. Time has already edited 
Wordsworth and Byron ; it will edit 
Longfellow. When this work of 
critical selection has been completed, 
there will remain a volume of verse, 
distinctly American, and genuinely 
poetic and melodious, not as Bee- 
thoven and Brahms are melodious, 
but as Mendelssohn and Schubert 
are melodious. 

Longfellow had a harmonious na- 
ture, a sensitive but controlled tem- 
perament, educational opportunities 
beautifully adapted to his needs, 
happy and congenial conditions and 
occupations, the companionship of 
scholars, the love of friends, and a 
quick and abiding popularity. Born 
in a provincial country and of Puri- 
tan ancestry, he was from the be- 
48 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

ginning of his career a restorer of 
the tradition of beauty, culture, and 
the arts which a one-sided view of 
life and a bitter political and military 
struggle had broken. With Irving, 
he stands among the earliest inter- 
preters of the old world of ripe civili- 
zation and rich historic association 
to a new world which, in severing 
governmental ties, had largely cut 
the deeper ties that unite peoples in 
the common heritage and achieve- 
ment of civilization. When Poe 
charged Longfellow with plagiarism, 
he wholly misconceived the spirit 
and function of the author of "Outre- 
Mer," "Hyperion," and "The 
Golden Legend " ; the same charge 
might have been brought against 
Shakespeare on the same ground. 
The young country was starving for 
beauty ; Longfellow fed it with the 
4 49 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

tradition, legend, romantic incident, 
the enchanting loveliness of art and 
nature in the Old World, as the little 
group of Transcendentalists fed its 
hunger for a more spiritual inter- 
pretation of work, occupations, and 
human relations by bringing it in 
contact with the Germany of Goethe, 
Kant, and Hegel, and the England 
of Coleridge. Longfellow was, at 
the beginning, a translator of rare 
sensitiveness and charm, as he was 
later a translator of scholarly accu- 
racy and precision. 

He was the first really popular 
singer in a country destitute of music 
and eager for the poetic rendering of 
the facts of its life. The Rumanians 
set all their occupations and experi- 
ences, from marriage, birth, and 
christening, through sowing and reap- 
ing, social and domestic festivals, to 

5° 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

sorrow and death, to the music of 
popular songs so many and so naive 
that they seem to spring out of the 
soil. Longfellow found tunes for 
universal sentiment, and set the most 
tender and intimate things to meas- 
ures so simple that they ran like a 
fresh stream of sentiment through 
American homes. " The Arsenal at 
Springfield," "The Village Black- 
smith," " The Reaper and the 
Flowers," "The Fire of Driftwood," 
are charged with a tenderness so wide 
and human that one does not stop to 
examine their credentials of thought 
too critically. 

If the unsympathetic find " The 
Psalm of Life" too elementary for 
their edification, they can hardly 
close their ears to the imaginative 
force and poetic skill of " The Wreck 
of the Hesperus," " Sir Humphrey 
51 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

Gilbert," "Victor Galbraith," and a 
little group of ballads neither com- 
monplace nor imitative ; while " The 
Children's Hour" and "My Lost 
Youth " and a large class of poems 
which they represent have the charm 
of pure feeling and the beauty of 
phrase which the true poet alone 
compasses. 

In narrative poetry Longfellow's 
achievements were of high and per- 
manent value, and " Evangeline," 
"The Song of Hiawatha," "The 
Courtship of Miles Standish," gave 
Americans their first poetic renderings 
of native incident and story, as Irving's 
"Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip 
Van Winkle " gave them their first 
local legends. The translation of the 
" Divine Comedy " was the latest 
expression of Longfellow's gener- 
ous passion to reunite the New with 

52 




-f 



HENRY WADSWORTH 
LONGFELLOW 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

o 

the Old World, as it was the 
most considerable achievement of 
his scholarship. 

The group of sonnets, written 
largely in the last decade of his life, 
place him among the masters of 
this exacting and expressive literary 
form ; his sensitive imagination, deep 
feeling, and exquisite craftsmanship 
equipped him for success where even 
Tennyson failed, and set him securely 
among sonneteers of very high rank. 
" There is no single sonnet,** writes 
Mr. Greenslet in his carefully phrased 
introduction to the whole body of 
the poet's sonnets, "so fine and mem- 
orable as many of Shakespeare's, as 
a few of Milton's and Wordsworth's, 
and as sundry fortunate sonnets by 
other hands that are among the choic- 
est treasures of English poetry. . . . 
Yet their average is incomparably 
S3 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

high.*' And nowhere is the height 
of thought and art so definitely reg- 
istered as in the sonnets which ac- 
company the translation of the 
" Divine Comedy/' which belong 
with the best modern poetry. 



INFERNO 

How strange the sculptures that adorn 

these towers ! 
This crowd of statues, in whose folded 

sleeves 
Birds build their nests; while canopied 

with leaves 
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised 

bowers, 
And the vast minster seems a cross of 

flowers ! 
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled 

eaves 
Watch the dead Christ between the 

living thieves, 

S4 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

And, underneath, the traitor Judas 
lowers ! 
Ah ! from what agonies of heart and brain. 
What exultations trampling on despair. 
What tenderness, what tears, what hate 
of wrong. 
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain. 
Uprose this poem of the earth and air. 
This mediaeval miracle of song ! 

INFERNO 

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door 
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat. 
Lay down his burden, and with reverent 

feet 
Enter, and cross himself, and on the 
floor 
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er; 
Far off the noises of the world retreat ; 
The loud vociferations of the street 
Become an undistinguishable roar. 
So, as I enter here from day to day. 

And leave my burden at this minster 
gate, 

55 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to 
pray, 
The tumult of the time disconsolate 
To inarticulate murmurs dies away, 
While the eternal ages watch and wait. 

PURGATORIO 

I enter, and I see thee in the gloom 
Of the long aisles, O poet Saturnine ! 
And strive to make my steps keep pace 

with thine. 
The air is filled with some unknown 

perfume ; 
The congregation of the dead make room 
For thee to pass ; the votive tapers 

shine ; 
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves 

of pine 
The hovering echoes fly from tomb to 

tomb. 
PVom the confessionals I hear arise 
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies, 
And lamentations from the crypts 

below j 

56 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

And then a voice celestial that begins 
With the pathetic words, " Although 

your sins 
As scarlet be," and ends with " as the 
snow." 

PURGATORIO 

With snow-white veil and garments as of 
flame. 
She stands before thee, who so long ago 
Filled thy young heart with passion and 

the woe 
From which thy song and all its splen- 
dors came ; 
And while with stern rebuke she speaks 
thy name. 
The ice about thy heart melts as the 

snow 
On mountain heights, and in swift 

overflow 
Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs 
of shame. 
Thou makest full confession ; and a gleam. 
As of the dawn on some dark forest cast, 
57 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase ; 

Lethe and Eunoe of the remembered dream 

And the forgotten sorrow — bring at 

last 
That perfect pardon which is perfect 

peace. 

PARADISO 

I lift mine eyes, and all the windows 
blaze 
With forms of Saints and holy men 

who died. 
Here martyred and hereafter glorified ; 
And the great Rose upon its leaves 
displays 
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic round- 
elays, 
With splendor upon splendor multi- 
plied ; 
And Beatrice again at Dante*s side 
No more rebukes, but smiles her words 
of praise. 
And then the organ sounds, and unseen 
choirs 

58 ^ 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and 

love 
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost ; 
And the melodious bells among the spires 
O'er all the housetops and through 

heaven above 
Proclaim the elevation of the Host ! ^ 



O star of morning and of liberty ! 

O bringer of the light, whose splendor 

shines 
Above the darkness of the Apennines, 
Forerunner of the day that is to be ! 
The voices of the city and the sea, 

The voices of the mountains and the 

pines, 
Repeat thy song, till the familiar 

lines 
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy ! 
Thy flame is blown abroad from all the 

heights, 
Through all the nations, and a sound is 

heard, 

1 Last stanza omitted. 

59 



Six Sonnets from Longfellow 

As of a mighty wind, and men devout, 
Strangers of Rome, and the new prose- 
lytes. 
In their own language bear thy won- 
drous word. 
And many are amazed and many doubt. 



60 



THE LINES ON TIN- 
TERN ABBEY 

IN 1793 Wordsworth, then in his 
twenty-third year, spent part of 
the summer in the Isle of Wight. 
On his homeward journey he walked 
over Salisbury Plain, where Carlyle 
and Emerson were to have a notable 
talk years later, made his way alone 
through the noble landscapeof Somer- 
set which is a charming prelude to the 
steep hills of Devonshire, crossed the 
Severn, and saw Tintern Abbey for 
the first time. Five years later he 
revisited the country about the Ab- 
bey, and so vivid and urgent was the 
impression it made upon him that 
he began at once to compose the 
61 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

" Lines Composed a Few Miles 
above Tintern Abbey " and finished 
the poem as he was entering Bristol, 
with his sister, at sunset, four or five 
days later. It was the poet*s habit 
to compose out of doors and to com- 
plete a poem before putting it on 
paper. He was often overheard re- 
citing his lines as he walked across 
the terraces and hills about Grasmere 
and Windermere ; " booing," his ru- 
ral neighbors used to call it. 

The Abbey, the key to the land- 
scape which inspired the " Lines," 
characterized by one of his biogra- 
phers as the " consecrated formulary 
of the Wordsworthian faith," is strik- 
ingly beautiful in its structure and 
surroundings. Furness Abbey, within 
two hours of Grasmere and Amble- 
side in these latter days, is far more 
extensive. Fountains Abbey suggests 
62 



The Lines on TIntern Abbey 

a richer and more varied habit of life, 
Dryburgh enfolds the grave of Scott 
with a peace born of its old arches 
set in verdure and shade; but Tin- 
tern has a poetic charm due to its se- 
clusion, the detachment of its ruined 
grandeur from modern association, 
the wild loveliness of the Wye which 
flows past it in a half-circle, the hill 
which rises beyond it, and the Severn 
which runs to the sea beyond the 
sight but within the vision. In the 
romantic beauty which secures great 
effects on a small scale and, in one 
of the most densely populated coun- 
tries, keeps an air of that sacred 
privacy between God and nature in 
which poetry has its unfailing spring, 
Tintern Abbey is unique. Despoiled 
in detail, its beauty seems more com- 
plete and impressive than that of 
many a perfect church. The nobility 

63 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

of its naked structure, the ascending 
symmetry of its aspiring lines, the 
sense of native strength and inde- 
structible solidity which it conveys, 
conspire to open the imagination to 
the poetry of its devastated majesty 
and its buried history. 

To Wordsworth it made the double 
appeal of natural beauty and of re- 
ligious association, and it was char- 
acteristic of him to describe with 
almost unrivaled power of suggestion 
the neighboring landscape as it lay 
before the eye : 

"These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, 
little lines 
Of sportive wood run wild ; these pas- 
toral farms, 
Green to the very door ; and wreaths of 

smoke 
Sent up, in silence, from among the 
trees ! " 

64 



The Lines on TIntern Abbey 

When the "Lines'* were written, 
he was twenty-eight years old, and 
on the threshold of the wonderful 
twelve or fifteen years in which the 
deeps of his spirit were broken up 
and his rigid and stubborn nature 
was subdued to the finest sensitive- 
ness, and his uncertain voice attuned 
to the purest music. After a winter 
in Germany in which " Lucy Gray," 
the lines on "Nutting," "Ruth," 
and other lyrical poems as simple as 
Nature and as instinct with life were 
written, the poet returned to the 
Lake Country to create its unique 
tradition, to illustrate with impres- 
sive dignity the life that is one with 
Nature, and to write his name on the 
roll of the English poets next after 
those of Shakespeare and Milton. 

The " Lines " appeared first in that 
modest little volume of " Lyrical 
5 ^S 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Ballads " which is almost worth its 
weight in gold to collectors, and 
which, ridiculed and derided by the 
professional critics of the time, is so 
rich in vitality that it promises to 
make even the name of its publisher, 
Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, immortal. It 
is true there were poems in the book 
to offend the orthodox and on which 
the true lover of the poet lays no 
emphasis to-day, but there were also 
" The Thorn ** and the " Lines," so 
fresh in feeling, so original in insight, 
so magical in phrase, that it would 
be hard to understand the long in- 
difference to their deep poetic beauty 
if one did not remember the immense 
vogue of Scott and, later, the intoxicat- 
ing audacity of Byron, Wordsworth^s 
earlier and later contemporaries. 

Wordsworth's genius lay in the 
merging of his observation with his 
66 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey- 
vision ; he saw with perfect clearness 
and he divined with penetrating di- 
rectness at the same moment. Ob- 
servation passed without pause into 
meditation, and passion waited on 
both. He has described his own 
method in condemning that of the 
poet who goes to Nature note-book 
in hand : " Nature does not permit 
an inventory to be made of her 
charms ! He should have left his 
pencil and note-book at home ; fixed 
his eye as he walked with a reverent 
attention on all that surrounded him, 
and taken all into a heart that could 
understand and enjoy. Afterwards 
he would have discovered that while 
much of what he admired was pre- 
served to him, much was also most 
wisely obliterated. That which re- 
mained, the picture surviving in his 
mind, would have presented the ideal 
(^1 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

and essential truth of the scene, and 
done so in large part by discarding 
much which, though in itself striking, 
was not characteristic.** Here are 
some of the secrets of Wordsworth's 
power : clear and accurate observa- 
tion, absorption by the mind of that 
which it has seen, instinctive selec- 
tion of the essential and rejection of 
the non-essential, and vivid descrip- 
tion, not by enumeration, but by 
suggestion. 

Wordsworth described rather than 
defined poetry as " the breath and 
finer spirit of all knowledge " ; and 
in his great moments he rises easily 
into this higher region where lives 
and moves the soul of things. Here, 
in a style at once plain, noble, inti- 
mate, impassioned, and penetrated 
with the beauty of the thought he 
is expressing, he applies the great- 
68 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

est ideas to life, to recall Matthew 
Arnold, and brings the world and 
the soul together until they are 
once more " whispering together of 
immortality." 

In his inspired moments he sees 
the world as it lies in the sight of 
the eye and as it shines in the sight 
of the imagination ; the actual and the 
visionary blend into one, the sym- 
bol becomes translucent, and Nature, 
through a myriad forms, one vast 
beneficent life. Rigid as he seemed, 
Wordsworth was in reality a man of 
deep passion, and the power of pas- 
sion is one of the secrets of his great- 
ness in perception and in expression. 
Not only did the " sounding cata- 
ract" haunt him like a passion, but 
the forces of his nature flowed to- 
gether and the spring of poetry within 
him gushed up when Nature touched 

69 



The Lines on TIntern Abbey 

him with her divining-rod in his 
happy hour. He had no style when 
he wrote poetry, but a tyro can imi- 
tate his style when he wrote verse, 
which he did in large quantities. 
When his work has been subjected 
to the austere judgment of time, much 
will be discarded ; but that which 
will remain will be counted among 
the spiritual and artistic achievements 
of the EngHsh race. As Matthew 
has said : 

" He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. 
He laid us as we lay at birth, 
On the cool, flowery lap of earth ; 
Smiles broke from us and we had ease ; 
The hills were round us, and the breeze 
Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; 
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain, 
Our youth returned, and there was shed 
On spirits that had long been dead. 
Spirits dried up and closely furl'd. 
The freshness of the early world." 
70 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Five years have past ; five summers, with 
the length 

Of five long winters ! and again I hear 

These waters, rolling from their mountain- 
springs 

With a sweet inland murmur. — Once 
again 

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs. 

That on a wild secluded scene impress 

Thoughts of more deep seclusion ; and 
connect 

The landscape with the quiet of the sky. 

The day is come when I again repose 

Here, under the dark sycamore, and view 

These plots of cottage-ground, these 
orchard-tufts. 

Which at this season, with their unripe 
fruits. 

Are clad in one green hue, and lose them- 
selves 

Among the woods and copses, nor disturb 

The wild green landscape. Once again 
I see 

These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little 
lines 

71 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Of sportive wood run wild ; these pastoral 

farms, 
Green to the very door; and wreaths of 

smoke 
Sent up, In silence, from among the trees ! 
With some uncertain notice, as might 

seem, 
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 
Or of some hermit's cave, where by his 

fire 
The Hermit sits alone. 

These beauteous forms. 
Through a long absence, have not been 

to me 
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, 
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. 
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart ; 
And passing even into my purer mind. 
With tranquil restoration : — feelings, too, 
Of unremembered pleasure : such, perhaps, 
As have no slight or trivial influence 
On that best portion of a good man's life, 
As little, nameless, unremembered acts 
72 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I 

trust, 
To them I may have ov^^ed another gift. 
Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed 

mood. 
In vi^hich the burthen of the mystery. 
In v^^hich the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world. 
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed 

mood. 
In which the affections gently lead us 

on, — 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame. 
And even the motion of our human blood. 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 
While with an eye made quiet by the 

power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy. 
We see into the life of things. 

If this 

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft — 
In darkness, and amid the many shapes 
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir 
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 

73 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Have hung upon the beatings of my 

heart — 
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 

sylvan Wye ! Thou wanderer through 
the woods. 

How often has my spirit turned to thee ! 

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished 

thought. 
With many recognitions dim and faint. 
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 
The picture of the mind revives again : 
While here I stand, not only with the sense 
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing 

thoughts 
That in this moment there is life and food 
P'or future years. And so I dare to hope, 
Though changed, no doubt, from what I 

was when first 

1 came among these hills ; when like a roe 
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides 
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, 
Wherever nature led : more like a man 
Flying from something that he dreads, 

than one 

74 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Who sought the thing he loved. For 

nature then 
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, 
And their glad animal movements all gone 

by) 
To me was all in all. — I cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy 

wood. 
Their colors and their forms, were then 

to me 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love. 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. — That time is 

past. 
And all its aching joys are now no more. 
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other 

gifts 
Have followed, for such loss, I would 

believe. 
Abundant recompense. For I have 

learned 

75 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing often- 
times 
The still, sad music of humanity. 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample 

power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have 

felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting 

suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air. 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of 

man : 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all 

thought. 
And rolls through all things. Therefore 

am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods. 
And mountains; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth ; of all the mighty 

world 

76 



The Lines on TIntern Abbey 

Of eye and ear, both what they half 

create, 
And what perceive ; well pleased to recog- 
nize 
In nature and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the 

nurse. 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and 

soul 
Of all my moral being. 

Nor perchance. 
If I were not thus taught, should I the 

more 
Suffer my genial spirits to decay : 
For thou art with me, here upon the banks 
Of this fair river ; thou, my dearest friend. 
My dear, dear friend, and in thy voice I 

catch 
The language of my former heart, and 

read 
My former pleasures in the shooting lights 
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while 
May I behold in thee what I was once. 
My dear, dear sister ! and this prayer I 

make, 

n 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Knowing that nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her ; 't is her privi- 
lege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to 

lead 
From joy to joy : for she can so inform 
The mind that is w^ithin us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil 

tongues. 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish 

men, 
Nor greetings vi^here no kindness is, 

nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life. 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we 

behold 
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the 

moon 
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk ; 
And let the misty mountain winds be free 
To blow against thee : and, in after years, 
When these wild ecstacies shall be ma- 
tured 

78 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind 
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 
For all sweet sounds and harmonies j oh ! 

then, 
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief. 
Should be thy portion, with what healing 

thoughts 
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me. 
And these thy exhortations ! Nor, per- 
chance — 
If I should be where I no more can hear 
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes 

these gleams 
Of past existence — wilt thou then forget 
That on the banks of this delightful 

stream 
We stood together; and that I, so long 
A worshiper of nature, hither came. 
Unwearied in that service : rather say 
With warmer love — oh ! with far deeper 

zeal 
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then 

forget. 
That after many wanderings, many years 
79 



The Lines on Tintern Abbey 

Of absence, these steep woods and lofty- 
cliffs, 

And this green pastoral landscape, were 
to me 

More dear, both for themselves and for 
thy sake ! 



80 



TO HELEN AND ISRAFEL 

LOWELL'S touch-and-go char- 
acterization of Poe — " three- 
fifths of him genius and two-fifths 
sheer fudge " — in the " Fable for 
Critics " has been accepted by so 
many readers as an authoritative val- 
uation of his work that it is a matter 
of justice to both poets to set beside 
it the comment on the early poetry of 
the author of " Israfel " printed by 
Lowell in Graham s Magazine in 
1845: 

" Mr. Poe's early productions show 
that he could see through the verse to the 
spirit beneath, and that he already had a 
feeling that all the life and grace of the 
one must depend on and be modulated by 
6 81 



To Helen and Israfel 

the will of the other. . . . Such pieces are 
only valuable when they display what we 
can only express by the contradictory 
phrase of inner experience." Of the lines 
" To Helen " Lowell wrote : " There is a 
little dimness in the filling up, but the 
grace and symmetry of the filling up are 
such as few poets ever attain. ... It is 
the tendency of the young poet that im- 
presses us. Here is no ' withering scorn,* 
no heart ' blighted ' ere it has safely got 
into its teens ; none of the drawing-room 
sansculottism which Byron had brought 
into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with 
a pleasant dash of the Greek Helicon in 
it. The melody of the whole, too, is 
remarkable. It is not of that kind which 
can be demonstrated arithmetically upon 
the tips of the fingers. It is of that finer 
sort which the inner ear alone can estimate. 
It seems simple^ like a Greek column^ because 
of its perfection. ... Mr. Poe had that 
indescribable something which men have 
called genius." 

82 



To Helen and Israfel 

Two qualities are credited to Poe 
in this estimate which have often 
been denied him : the presence of an 
inner experience behind the poem, 
which informs, irradiates, and shapes 
it and brings it within the field of 
high and sincere artistic achievement. 
Poe has been charged with being a 
"jingle man"; a calculating artificer 
in words ; a hypnotist with sound ; a 
magical craftsman, but not a genuine 
artist. He has been denied the gift 
of that melody which the "inner ear 
alone can estimate." He has been 
charged also with practicing the evil 
magic of those who deceive by imita- 
tion, and denied the magic of that ulti- 
mate grace which erases all trace of tool 
and toil. The simple fact is that Poe 
wrote a small group of poems as lovely 
and as far beyond the reach of analysis 
as the most delicate flower; and the 
83 



To Helen and Israfel 

very perfection of these pieces teases 
the critics who come to them with the 
usual academic apparatus or with 
the standards of distinctively ethical or 
intellectual art. It is a difficult truth 
for an over-sophisticated age to learn 
that the most exquisite works of art 
are only subordinately intellectual 
and that they gain their immortal 
bloom because they spring from a 
soil which no man has plowed or 
sown. Mr. Brownell, who brings 
to criticism gifts of concentration 
and analysis which no other Amer- 
ican critic has commanded, recently 
paid Poe the tribute of a com- 
ment of extraordinary closeness of 
thought and minuteness of scrutiny 
— but left him unexplained. He 
fired a battery of artillery over a 
few flowers of exquisite and pallid 
beauty, and the flowers remain un- 
84 



To Helen and Israfel 

disturbed and of an inexplicable 
charm. 

In March, 1831, there appeared in 
New York a slender volume which 
bore the inconspicuous title " Poems." 
It was a reprint of a previously- 
published book of verse, with the 
omission of six poems and the addi- 
tion of six. If any doubt of the 
original and creative poetic impulse 
and gift of the author remained after 
reading " Al Aaraaf," " Tamerlane," 
and "Fairyland" in the earlier collec- 
tion, it disappeared when the lines 
" To Helen," " Israfel," " The City 
in the Sea," were read in the later 
collection. Here unmistakably a 
poet to whom the inner and the outer 
beauty were one, whose thought 
fashioned his art and whose art was 
of the very substance of his thought, 
was speaking; one whose sole con- 
85 



To Helen and Israfel 

cern was to reproduce in words the 
inner experience of a spirit sensitive 
to the lightest stir of leaves or the 
faintest glow of light on the world 
without imagining itself on the world 
within. These poems were not ethi- 
cal or intellectual ; they did not apply 
ideas to life ; they were great neither 
in thought, experience, nor range ; 
they were simply perfect. They were 
in a category which few American 
critics and readers of that time had 
framed ; foreign critics and poets, 
who knew that beauty was a form 
of righteousness, and that there were 
forms of teaching afield which were 
not of the pulpit or of the reformers, 
had a place for them and knew at 
once where to put them. 

They were the work of an appren- 
tice hand ; which deepens the mystery 
of their perfection. The lines " To 
86 




EDGAR ALLAN POE 



To Helen and Israfel 

Helen " and " Israfel " were probably 
composed a year earlier than their 
publication, while the poet was wait- 
ing for his commission as a cadet, or 
while he was at West Point. With 
" Ulalume," " The City in the Sea," 
" Lenore," they establish the fame of 
Poe to be counted in the little group 
of American writers who have made 
contributions to the literature of the 
world. " The Raven ** is probably 
the most widely known poem from 
American hands, and " The Bells " 
is not far behind it in popularity. 
Neither, however, is to be placed 
with the little group of almost fault- 
less lyrics ; they have a magical effec- 
tiveness in the world of sound ; the 
touch of the virtuoso of genius on 
the open and closed vowels, and the 
use of the refrain and repetend, set 
free a subtle hypnotic influence which 
87 



To Helen and Israfel 

lays the listener under a spell ; but 
there is an element of calculation 
which releases him when silence 
breaks the enchantment. But in a 
small group of lyrics Poe made a 
lasting achievement and showed 
a magical skill in producing a single 
striking and unusual effect, by con- 
centration of interest, subordination 
of secondary meaning, compression of 
thought and feeling within a narrow 
compass, and the identification of the 
poem with a distinctive metrical 
effect ; his theory and his practice 
blending with almost absolute pre- 
cision and harmony. 

Aside from the confusion of life 
which has no bearing on the specific 
quality and charm of his lyrics, the 
head and front of Poe's offense lay in 
the fact that he was an artist pure and 
simple, in an ethical and reformatory 
88 



To Helen and Israfel 

age when " all New England was a 
pulpit," and that he still appeals to a 
people intensely absorbed by their 
unescapable tasks and not yet sensi- 
tive to beauty nor awake to the 
meaning and place of art. He has 
waited long for clear and adequate 
appreciation ; for the rank at home 
which has been given him abroad. 
He can afford to wait; for while his 
work lacks greatness of range, pas- 
sion, reality, it shows the individual- 
ity of conception and distinction of 
workmanship which lie within reach 
of the true poets only. " I could 
not afford to spare from my circle a 
poet," wrote Emerson to a friend, 
" so long as he can offer so indisput- 
able a token as a good poem of his 
relation to what is highest in Being.** 
Is Poe's claim to rank among the 

poets disputed because it rests on 
89 



To Helen and Israfel 

songs so few and of a quality so 
elusive ? When was poetry measured 
by magnitude or valued by bulk ? 
How little there is of Keats, and how 
securely his kinship with the greater 
English poets rests on that group 
of odes and sonnets ! How often 
Emerson came with serene and smil- 
ing face to the temple ; how rarely he 
brought the gods the gift of immortal 



song ! 



TO HELEN 



Helen, thy beauty is to me 

Like those Nicean barks of yore, 

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea. 

The weary, way-worn wanderer bore 
To his own native shore. 

On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face. 

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 
To the glory that was Greece, 
And the grandeur that was Rome. 
90 



To Helen and Israfel 

Lo ! In yon brilliant window-niche 
How statue-like I see thee stand ! 
The agate lamp within thy hand. 

Ah ! Psyche, from the regions which 
Are Holy Land ! 

ISRAFEL 

And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, 
and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures. — 
Koran. 

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell 

" Whose heart-strings are a lute ; ** 

None sing so wildly well 

As the angel Israfel, 

And the giddy stars (so legends tell). 

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell 
Of his voice, all mute. 

Tottering above 

In her highest noon. 

The enamoured moon 
Blushes with love, 

While, to listen, the red levin 

(With the rapid Pleiads, even, 

Which were seven) 

Pauses in Heaven. 
91 



To Helen and Israfel 

And they say (the starry choir 
And the other listening things) 

That Israfeli's fire 

Is owing to that lyre 

By which he sits and sings — 

The trembling living wire 
Of those unusual strings. 

But the skies that angel trod, 

Where deep thoughts are a duty, 

Where Love's a grown-up God, 
Where the Houri glances are 

Imbued with all the beauty 
Which we worship in a star. 

Therefore, thou art not wrong, 

Israfeli, who despisest 
An unimpassioned song ; 
To thee the laurels belong. 

Best bard, because the wisest ! 
Merrily live, and long ! 

The ecstasies above 

With thy burning measures suit — 
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love, 

92 



To Helen and Israfel 

With the fervor of thy lute — 
Well may the stars be mute ! 

Yes, Heaven is thine ; but this 
Is a vi^orld of sweets and sours ; 
Our flowers are merely — flowers. 

And the shadow of thy perfect bliss 
Is the sunshine of ours. 

If I could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody. 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky. 



93 



ODE ON A GRECIAN 
URN 

WHEN Keats composed the 
" Ode on a Grecian Urn," in 
1 8 19, he was in his twenty-fifth year, 
and in the happiest hour of his crea- 
tive work. To this period belong 
five odes which, by their various and 
unique excellence, place him among 
the greater English poets. " Endym- 
ion " has lines of exquisite beauty, 
and is penetrated with the spirit of 
poetry, but it fails both in construc- 
tion and form to rise into the region 
of mature and ripened art. " Hy- 
perion " has an amplitude of imagi- 
native suggestion which discloses a 
great poetic force dealing with ma- 
94 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

terials which, although clearly within 
its vision, are still beyond its grasp. 
There are evidences of structural 
genius and of the power to apply 
fundamental ideas to life in the longer 
poems ; but Keats died too early for 
their full and instinctive play in his 
work. On this side, the side on which 
the greatest poets reveal clear mas- 
tery, Keats remains a poet of high 
promise ; on the side of freshness of 
diction and imagination, of the magic 
which gathers from words their first 
delicious bloom and opens them to the 
very heart of their ultimate beauty, 
which captures and holds the elusive 
loveliness in things and in thought, 
Keats is not only a poet of achieve- 
ment, he is the poet of poets ; the type 
of concentrated poetic consciousness 
and a past-master of verbal felicity. 
These claims for his pre-eminence 
95 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

rest on the Odes, on " St. Agnes' 
Eve," and on two or three sonnets, and 
find abundant justification in their 
contrasting perfections. To the five 
Odes " St. Agnes' Eve," composed 
in Chichester in January, 1819, was 
a prelude, and " Lamia," begun in 
Shanklin in the following June, was 
an epilogue ; between these two pieces 
of verse, the first of a marvelous rich- 
ness of diction, Keats touched the 
heights of his art and made his last- 
ing contribution to English poetry. 
The " Ode on Melancholy " has both 
a classic and a personal touch ; beauty 
is still all-compelling, but " beauty 
that must die " : 

"... In the very temple of Delight 
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine; " 

in the " Ode on Indolence " the per- 
sonal note is struck with diminished 
96 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

resonance and fullness of tone ; the 
odes " To Autumn " and " To a 
Nightingale " belong in the realm of 
purest poesy — the first mellow with 
the ultimate ripeness of nature, the 
second poised above the earth as 
truly as the bird with which it flies 
on equal wing. 

These four odes, with the " St. 
Agnes* Eve," are saturated with the 
romantic spirit — drenched, so to 
speak, with romantic feeling ; the 
" Ode on a Grecian Urn " stands in 
exquisite contrast, like a pure marble 
against a rich tapestry. Its restraint, 
its delicately etched detail, its imagi- 
native insight and captivating charm 
of phrase, a certain ardor drained of 
its passion by time into a ravishing 
memory, — invest the ode with a 
loveliness which places it among the 
most precious possessions of modern 
7 97 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

literature. The structure of the verse 
is simple : there are five rhymes in 
each stanza, the first two forming a 
quatrain and the second three a ses- 
tet. No known piece of sculpture 
shows the series of pictures in the 
ode, though Bacchic processions are 
common on antique urns, and one 
of the treasures of Holland House 
is a pastoral sacrifice very like that 
described in the fourth stanza. Keats 
learned his mythology at second hand; 
but he learned it through his imagi- 
nation, as the Athenian boys who 
became its immortal interpreters in 
architecture, sculpture, and poetry 
learned and were inspired by it. At 
school, when the passion for knowl- 
edge suddenly possessed him, he 
learned Tooke's " Pantheon,'' Lem- 
priere's " Dictionary," and Spence's 
" Polymetis " by heart ; the gods 
98 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

and goddesses came radiant out of 
these dry catalogues and lived hence- 
forth immortal in his imagination. 

The publication of Keats's " Let- 
ters " made an end of the mawkish 
tradition of his hysteria and senti- 
mental weakness. He was sensitive, 
or he would not have been the poet 
of the Odes ; but weak and passion- 
tossed he was not ; nor did he die 
by the hand of dull-minded reviewers. 
The tragedy of his life cut to the 
quick ; to receive in the same hour 
the consciousness of genius and the 
knowledge that death was coming 
with equal foot could leave no man 
unmoved. He was a pugnacious 
boy, with a glowing imagination ; he 
had a perception of beauty so keen 
that it was poignant, and a love of it 
so intense that it was sensuous ; but 
he died at twenty-five, the year after 
99 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " was 
composed ! The tumult of feeling 
gave place to calmness ; during the 
last hours Severn read Jeremy Tay- 
lor's "Holy Living and Dying** to 
him, and played Haydn's sonatas, 
which he liked best. The end came 
suddenly : " Severn — I — lift me up 
— I am dying — I shall die easy; 
don't be frightened — be firm, and 
thank God it has come." 

" There is but one path for me," 
he wrote two years before his death ; 
" the road lies through application, 
study, and thought. I will pursue 
it." ..." I must think," he said 
earlier, " that difficulties nerve the 
spirit of a man ; they make our prime 
objects a refuge as well as a passion." 
Byron at the height of his great 
popularity he characterized as " a fine 
thing in the sphere of the worldly. 



lOO 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

theatrical, and pantomimical." After 
enumerating the " Excursion/* Hay- 
don's pictures, and Hazlitt's depth 
of taste as three superior things, he 
told his brothers that he was not 
speaking " with any poor vanity that 
works of genius were the first things 
in the world. No ! for that sort of 
probity and disinterestedness which 
such men as Bailey possess does hold 
and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual 
honors that can be paid to anything 
in this world." The man who wrote 
these words, who met the tragedy of 
genius held out to him by the hand 
of death, who enriched his few brief 
hours with the " Ode on a Grecian 
Urn," and its immortal fellows, in a 
moment of weakness composed his 
own epitaph; but it was rank injustice 
to put on his tomb, for the literal- 
minded to read in all coming time, 

lOI 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

words to which his fame gives a ring- 
ing denial : " His name was writ in 
water." 

Thou still unravished bride of quietness, 
Thou foster-child of silence and slow 
time, 
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 
A flowery tale more sweetly than our 
rhyme : 
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy 
shape 
Of deities or mortals, or of both. 

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady ? 
What men or gods are these ? What 
maidens loth ? 
What mad pursuit ? What struggle to 
escape ? 
What pipes and timbrels ? What 
wild ecstasy ? 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those 
unheard 
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, 
play on, 

I02 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, 

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone : 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst 
not leave 
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be 
bare. 
Bold lover, never, never canst thou 
kiss. 
Though winning near the goal — yet do 
not grieve : 
She cannot fade, though thou hast 
not thy bliss ; 
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair ! 

Ah, happy, happy boughs ! that cannot 
shed 
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring 
adieu ; 
And happy melodist, unwearied. 

Forever piping songs forever new; 
More happy love ! more happy, happy 
love ! 
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed. 
Forever panting and forever young; 
All breathing human passion far above, 
103 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and 
cloyed, 
A burning forehead, and a parching 
tongue. 

Who are these coming to the sacrifice ? 
To what green altar, O mysterious 
priest, 
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the 
skies. 
And all her silken flanks with garlands 
drest ? 
What little town by river or sea shore. 
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel. 
Is emptied of its folk, this pious 
morn ? 
And, little town, thy streets forevermore 
Will silent be, and not a soul to tell 
Why thou art desolate can e'er 
return. 

O Attic shape ! Fair attitude ! with 
brede 
Of marble men and maidens over- 
wrought, 

104 



Ode on a Grecian Urn 

With forest branches and the trodden 
weed ; 
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of 
thought 
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral ! 

When old age shall this generation 
waste, 
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other 
woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom 
thou say'st, 
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that 
is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need 
to know. 



105 



THE HAMADRYAD 

THE contradictions in Landor's 
career are so many and so dra- 
matic that they give the keynote to his 
character. No other English writer 
has left such a variety and range of 
comment on life and art, and yet 
none has been more helpless in deal- 
ing with his own affairs ; a man of 
meditative habit, brooding over men 
and events, he could say, " I never 
did a single wise thing in the whole 
course of my existence." Perhaps 
no man has contributed a larger num- 
ber of great thoughts to English 
literature, and yet it is true, as Lowell 
said, that he was not a great thinker ; 
not a great thinker, that is, in the 
1 06 



The Hamadryad 

sense of having a consistent and fruit- 
ful view of things. Of no other poet 
in our language can it be said more 
truthfully that his work has the classi- 
cal qualities than Landor — the quali- 
ties of objectivity, restraint, simpHcity, 
lucidity — and yet no one among 
English poets has been more impul- 
sive, violent, and unbalanced in judg- 
ment. He thought like a sage and 
acted like a Titanic boy ; he had a 
temperament of volcanic explosive- 
ness, and yet it was his special gift 
to write poetry of crystalline purity of 
form and of the most delicately shaded 
beauty of feeling. 

"I drank of Avon too, a drangerous draught 
That roused within the feverish thirst of 
song." 

Born in Shakespeare's country, 
Landor had something of Shake- 

107 



The Hamadryad 

speare's breadth of view, power of 
looking at things detached from 
himself, and fecundity ; but he had 
little of Shakespeare's flowing humor, 
spontaneity, wealth of sympathy, 
and richness of imagination ; and in 
method and form the two poets 
were antipodal. A scholar by in- 
stinct and training, deeply read in 
many fields, conscious of the extra- 
ordinary force of his mind, and of 
great physical strength, Landor*s 
attitude toward the world was one of 
assured superiority. When he said, 
" I shall dine late ; but the dining- 
room will be well lighted, the guests 
few and select," he was well within 
the truth ; there were a few, and they 
were of the best, who recognized his 
genius during his life; the larger read- 
ing public gave him small attention ; 
and, forty-five years after his death, his 
io8 



The Hamadryad 

guests are still few, but their presence 
is an honor to the host, and they 
linger late : 

" I never courted friends or Fame ; 
She pouted at me long, at last she 

came, 
And threw her arms around my neck 

and said. 
Take what hath been for years delayed, 
And fear not that the leaves will fall 
One hour the earlier from thy coronal." 

H eadstrong, tumultuous, rash, Lan- 
dor was a violent republican while 
yet a boy at Rugby, correcting the 
scholarly estimates of bishops, even 
going so far as to wish that the French 
would invade England and hang 
George III between the Archbishops 
of Canterbury and York ! But there 
were genial slopes on the sides of this 
volcanic nature, and he never lacked 
devoted friends. In Trinity College, 
109 



The Hamadryad 

at Oxford, he was the " mad Jacobin," 
and succeeded in getting himself 
rusticated by sending, as a practical 
joke, a charge of shot across the hall 
into a room where a rival party was 
being held and then refusing to give 
any information about the occurrence. 
Returning home, he promptly quar- 
reled with his father and set out to 
make his own fortune. 

No man of greater genius, energy, 
and generosity of nature ever started 
on a more hopeless quest than did 
Landor when he left his father's 
house. He read diligently, worked 
hard, wrote " Gebir," an epic of tragic 
import, which the poets have always 
loved, but of which the reading public 
remembers only the famous lines on 
the sea-shell : 

" Shake one and it awakens ; then apply 
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, 



no 



The Hamadryad 

And It remembers Its august abodes, 
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs 
there." 

In 1808 Landor equipped a regi- 
ment and went to Spain to fight Na- 
poleon ; a romantic enterprise which 
dissolved in a cloud of quarrels,its sole 
practical result being the writing of 
" Count Julian." Then he married in 
great haste and repented through a 
long leisure ; left England because 
his over-generous living bred impor- 
tunate creditors; fled to Italy; spent 
two decades at Florence or in its 
lovely suburb, Fiesole ; quarreled with 
his wife at sixty and returned to Eng- 
land ,• at eighty-three, a passionate 
and undignified Lear, he went back to 
Italy to be watched over by Browning, 
and to die like an untamed lion in 
1864. At seventy-eight he published 
" The Last Fruit of an Old Tree," 
III 



The Hamadryad 

and prefixed it with the haughty- 
lines : 

" I strove with none, for none was worth 
my strife ; 
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, 
Art: 
I warmed both hands before the fire of 
life; 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

Landor*s literary activity, begin- 
ning in 1795 and ending in 1863, 
extended over a period of sixty-eight 
years. He was almost equally at 
home in English and Latin, in prose 
and verse, in essay, lyric, and drama ; 
he gave the word " conversation '* a 
new and wider meaning in literature. 
He admired Pindar's " proud com- 
placency and scornful strength. If I 
could resemble him in nothing else, 

I was resolved to be as compendious 
112 



The Hamadryad 

and as exclusive." In his work in 
all kinds he revealed the qualities 
the lack of which brought his life 
into confusion : self-control, dignity, 
calmness, and temperance of speech. 
The "Imaginary Conversations" 
cover a wide range of ancient and 
modern life, and are crowded with 
close characterizations, criticism, and 
comment. " The citation of Wil- 
liam Shakespeare," of which Lamb 
said that only two men could have 
composed it, he who wrote it and the 
man about whom it was written, is 
the most notable piece of literature 
that Warwickshire has produced 
since Shakespeare's time, and is a 
striking study of the poet and his 
neighbors at Charlecote. There are 
heavy pages in the " Pentameron," 
but there are also pages steeped in 
atmosphere of the older Florence and 

8 113 



The Hamadryad 

not lacking the Boccaccian flavor. 
In beauty of phrase, both in prose 
and verse, " Pericles and Aspasia " is 
a little masterpiece and belongs in a 
place by itself; for there is nothing 
quite akin to it in English. Like 
Maurice de Guerin's lovely fragment, 
" The Centaur," it conveys that 
elusive sense of the antique which is 
the soul of the religion, sculpture, 
temples, poetry that have so deeply 
wrought upon the human spirit. 
The joyous England of the Renais- 
sance ; the passionate, beauty-loving 
Italy of Boccaccio and Petrarch ; the 
exquisite poetry of form and feeling, 
of art and life, of men and women 
moving in sculpturesque beauty under 
a cloudless sky — how vital and how 
penetrating the genius that compassed 
these various potencies of life, these 

diverse aspects of art ! 
114 




WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 



The Hamadryad 

The " Hellenics," some written 
originally in Latin and later trans- 
lated into English, and some written 
originally in English, were finally 
collected and published in 1847. 

" Who will away to Athens with me ? 

Who 
Loves choral songs and maidens crown'd 

with flowers 
Unenvious ? Mount the pinnace ; hoist 

the sail." 

To these exquisite poems the 
much-abused adjective " classical " 
belongs. They are perhaps the best 
examples in English of the qualities 
of antique verse : objectiveness, sim- 
plicity, lucidity, restraint; their 
charm is atmospheric, and issues 
from pure form, definiteness of line, 
and distinctness of molding. There 
is no touch of mysticism on these 
bright presences, no haunting sense 



The Hamadryad 

of unfathomable abysses ; they have 
the beauty of natural life, the grace 
of unconscious action, the free play 
of spontaneous creation. The loveli- 
ness resides not in suggestion but in 
definition ; but definition which sub- 
stitutes the play of a plastic hand for 
the precision of formal logic. Their 
beauty is the beauty of perfect form 
in a crystalline air, not the beauty of 
color heightened by a diffused rich- 
ness of atmosphere ; it is the beauty 
of a free and gracious order rather 
than that of a poignant and penetrat- 
ing individuality. 

Rhaicos was born amid the hills wherefrom 
Gnidos the light of Caria is discern'd, 
And small are the white-crested that play 

near, ' 

And smaller onward are the purple waves. 
Thence festal choirs were visible, all 

crown'd 

ii6 



The Hamadryad 

With rose and myrtle if they were inborn ; 
If from Pandion sprang they, on the coast 
Where stern Athene rais'd her citadel, 
Then olive was entwined with violets 
Cluster'd in bosses regular and large ; 
For various men wore various coronals. 
But one was their devotion ; 't was to her 
Whose laws all follow, her whose smile 

withdraws 
The sword from Ares, thunberbolt from 

Zeus, 
And whom in his chill caves the mutable 
Of mind, Poseidon, the sea-king, reveres, 
And whom his brother, stubborn Dis, 

hath pray'd 
To turn in pity the averted cheek 
Of her he bore away, with promises. 
Nay, with loud oath before dread Styx 

itself. 
To give her daily more and sweeter 

flowers 
Than he made drop from her on Enna's 

dell. 

Rhaicos was looking from his father's 

door 

117 



The Hamadryad 

At the long trains that hastened to the town 
From all the valleys, like bright rivulets 
Gurgling with gladness, wave outrunning 

wave. 
And thought it hard he might not also go 
And offer up one prayer, and press one 

hand. 
He knew not whose. The father call'd 

him in 
And said, " Son Rhaicos ! those are idle 

games ; 
Long enough I have lived to find them so." 
And ere he ended, sighed ; as old men do 
Always, to think how idle such games are. 
" I have not yet," thought Rhaicos in his 

heart. 

And wanted proof. 

" Suppose thuu go and help 

Echion at the hill, to bark yon oak 

And lop its branches off, before we delve 

About the trunk and ply the root with ax; 

This we may do in winter." 

Rhaicos went ; 

For thence he could see farther, and see 

more 

ii8 



The Hamadryad 

Of those who hurried to the city-gate. 
Echion he found there, with naked arm 
Swart-hair'd, strong-sinew'd, and his eyes 

intent 
Upon the place where first the ax should 

fall; 
He held it upright. " There are bees 

about, 
Or wasps, or hornets," said the cautious 

eld, 
" Look sharp, O son of Thallinos ! " 

The youth 
Inclined his ear, afar, and warily. 
And cavern'd in his hand. He heard a 

buzz 
At first, and then the sound grew soft and 

clear. 
And then divided into what seem'd tune. 
And there were words upon it, plaintive 

words. 
He turn'd and said, " Echion ! do not 

strike 
That tree : it must be hollow; for some god 
Speaks from within. Conie thyself near." 

Again 

119 



The Hamadryad 

Both turn'd toward it : and behold ! there 

sat 
Upon the moss below, with her two 

palms 
Pressing it on each side, a maid in form. 
Downcast were her long eyelashes, and 

pale 
Her cheek, but never mountain-ash dis- 
played 
Berries of color like her lip so pure. 
Nor were the anemones about her hair 
Soft, smooth, and wavering like the face 

beneath. 
" What dost thou hear ? " Echion, 

half-afraid. 
Half-angry, cried. She lifted up her eyes. 
But nothing spake she. Rhaicos drew 

one step 
Backward, for fear came likewise over 

him. 
But not such fear : he panted, gasp'd, 

drew in 
His breath, and would have turn'd it into 

words. 

But could not into one. 
1 20 



The Hamadryad 

" O send away 
That sad old man ! " said she. The old 

man went 
Without a warning from his master's son, 
Glad to escape, for sorely he now fear'd. 
And the ax shone behind them in their 

eyes. 

Hamad. And wouldst thou too shed 

the most innocent 
Of blood ? No vow demands itj no god 

wills 
The oak to bleed. 

Rhaicos. Who art thou ? whence ? 

why here ? 
And whither would thou go ? Among the 

robed 
In white or saffron, or the hue that most 
Resembles dawn or the clear sky, is none 
Array'd as thou art. What so beautiful 
As that gray robe which clings about thee 

close, 
Like moss to stones adhering, leaves to 

trees. 
Yet lets thy bosom rise and fall in turn, 

121 



The Hamadryad 

As, touch'd by zephyrs, fall and rise the 

boughs 
Of graceful platan by the river-side ? 
Ha?nad. Lovest thou well thy father's 

house ? 
Rhaicos. Indeed 

I love it, well I love it, yet would leave 
For thine, where'er it be, my father's 

house. 
With all the marks upon the door, that 

show 
My growth at every birthday since the 

third. 
And all the charms, o'erpowering evil eyes. 
My mother nail'd for me against my bed. 
And the Cydonian bow (which thou shalt 

see) 
Won in my race last spring from Eutychos. 
Hamad. Bethink thee what it is to 

leave a home 
Thou never yet hast left, one night, one 

day. 
Rhaicos. No, 't is not hard to leave it : 

't is not hard 
To leave, O maiden, that paternal home 

122 



The Hamadryad 

If there be one on earth whom we may 

love 

First, last, forever ; one who says that she 

Will love forever too. To say which 

word. 

Only to say it, surely is enough. 

It shows such kindness — if 't were possible 

We at the moment think she would indeed. 

Hamad. Who taught thee all this folly 

at thy age ? 

Rhaicos. I have seen lovers and have 

learnt to love. 

Hamad. But wilt thou spare the tree ? 

Rhaicos. My father wants 

The bark ; the tree may hold its place 

awhile. 

Ha?nad. Awhile ? thy father numbers 

then my days ? 

Rhaicos. Are there no others where the 

moss beneath 

Is quite as tufty ? Who would send thee 

forth 

Or ask thee why thou tarriest ? Is thy 

flock 

Anywhere near ? 

123 



The Hamadryad 

Hamad. I have no flock : I kill 

Nothing that breathes, that stirs, that feels 

the air, 
The sun, the dew. Why should the 

beautiful 
(And thou art beautiful) disturb the source 
Whence springs all beauty ? Hast thou 

never heard 
Of Hamadryads ? 

Rbaicos. Heard of them I have : 

Tell me some tale about them. May I sit 
Beside thy feet ? Art thou not tired ? The 

herbs 
Are very soft ; I will not come too nigh ; 
Do but sit there, nor tremble so, nor 

doubt. 
Stay, stay an instant : let me first explore 
If any acorn of last year be left 
Within it ; thy thin robe too ill protects 
Thy dainty limbs against the harm one 

small 

Acorn may do. Here 's none. Another day 

Trust me ; till then let me sit opposite. 

Hamad. I seat me ; be thou seated, and 

content. 

124 



The Hamadryad 

Rhaicos. O sight for gods ! ye men be- 
low ! adore 
The Aphrodite. Is she there below ? 
Or sits she here before me ? as she sate 
Before the shepherd on those heights that 

shade 
The Hellespont, and brought his kindred 

woe. 
Hamad. Reverence the higher Powers ; 

nor deem amiss 
Of her who pleads to thee, and would 

repay — 
Ask not how much — but very much. 

Rise not : 
No, Rhaicos, no ! Without the nuptial vow 
Love is unholy. Swear to me that none 
Of mortal maids shall ever taste thy kiss, 
Then take thou mine ; then take it, not 

before. 
Rhaicos. Hearken, all gods above ! O 

Aphrodite ! 
O Here ! Let my vow be ratified ! 
But wilt thou come into my father's house ? 
Hamad. Nay : and of mine I cannot 

give thee part. 

125 



The Hamadryad 

Rhaicos, Where is it ? 
Hamad. In this oak. 

Rhaicos. Ay ; now begins 

Tlie tale of Hamadryad ; tell it through. 
Hamad. Pray of thy father never to cut 
down 
My tree; and promise him, as well thou 

mayst, 
That every year he shall receive from me ^ 
More honey than will buy him nine fat 

sheep, 
More wax than he will burn to all the 

gods. 
Why fallest thou upon thy face ? Some 

thorn 
May scratch it, rash young man ! Rise 
up ; for shame ! 
Rhaicos. For shame I cannot rise. O 
pity me ! 
I dare not sue for love — but do not hate ! 
Let me once more behold thee — not once 

more, 
But many days : let me love on — unloved ! 
I aimed too high : on my own head the bolt 
Falls back, and pierces to the very brain, 
126 



The Hamadryad 

Hamad. Go — rather go, than make me 

say I love. 
Rhaicos. If happiness is immortality, 
(And whence enjoy it else the gods above ?) 
I am immortal too : my vow is heard — 
Hark ! on the left — Nay, turn not from 

me now, 
I claim my kiss. 

Hamad. Do men take first, then claim ? 

Do thus the seasons run their course with 

them ? 

Her lips were seal'd ; her head sank on 

his breast. 

'T is said that laughs were heard within 

the wood : 
But who should hear them ? and whose 
laughs ? and why ? 

Savoury was the smell and long past 
noon, 
Thallinos ! in thy house; for marjoram, 
Basil and mint, and thyme and rosemary. 
Were sprinkled on the kid's well-roasted 

length. 
Awaiting Rhaicos. Home he came at last, 
127 



The Hamadryad 

Not hungry, but pretending hunger keen, 
With head and eyes just o'er the maple 

plate. 
" Thou seest but badly, coming from the 

sun. 
Boy Rhaicos ! " said the father. " That 

oak's bark 
Must have been tough, with little sap 

between ; 
It ought to run ; but it and I are old." 
Rhaicos, although each morsel of the bread 
Increased by chewing, and the meat grew 

cold 
And tasteless to his palate, took a draught 
Of gold-bright wine, which, thirsty as he 

was. 
He thought not of, until his father fill'd 
The cup, averring water was amiss. 
But wine had been at all times pour'd on 

kid. 
It was religion. 

He thus fortified 
Said, not quite boldly, and not quite abash'd, 
" Father, that oak is Zeus's own ; that 

oak 

128 



The Hamadryad 

Year after year will bring thee wealth from 

wax 
And honey. There is one who fears the 

gods 
And the gods love — that one " 

(He blush'd, nor said, 
What one) 

" Has promised this, and may do 
more. 
Thou hast not many moons to wait until 
The bees have done their best ; if then 

there come 
Nor wax nor honey, let the tree be hewn." 
" Zeus hath bestow'd on thee a prudent 

mind," 
Said the glad sire ; " but look thou often 

there. 
And gather all the honey thou canst find." 
The nights had now grown longer, and 

perhaps 
The Hamadryads find them lone and dull 
Among their woods ; one did, alas ! She 

called 
Her faithful bee : 't was when all bees 

should sleep, 

9 129 



The Hamadryad 

And all did sleep but hers. She was sent 

forth 
To bring that light which never wintry 

blast 
Blows out, nor rain nor snow extinguishes, 
The light that shines from loving eyes 

upon 
Eyes that love back, till they can see no 

more. 
Rhaicos was sitting at his father's hearth : 
Between them stood the table, not o'er- 

spread 
With fruits which autumn now profusely 

bore. 
Nor anise cakes, nor odorous wine; but 

there 
The draught-board was expanded; at which 

game 
Triumphant sat old Thallinos ; the son 
Was puzzled, vex'd, discomfited, dis- 
traught. 
A buzz was at his ear : up went his 

hand 

And it was heard no longer. The poor 

bee 

130 



The Hamadryad 

Return'd (but not until the morn shone 

bright) 
And found the Hamadryad with her head 
Upon her aching wrist, and show'd one 

wing 
Half-broken ofF, the other's meshes marr'd, 
And there were bruises which no eye 

could see 
Saving a Hamadryad's. 

At this sight 
Down fell the languid brow, both hands 

fell down, 
A shriek was carried to the ancient hall 
Of Thallinos : he heard it not : his son 
Heard it, and ran forthwith into the wood. 
No bark was on the tree, no leaf was 

green, 
The trunk was riven through. From that 

day forth 
Nor word nor whisper sooth'd his ear, nor 

sound 
Even of insect wing ; but loud laments 
The woodman and the shepherds one long 

year 

131 



The Hamadryad 

Heard day and night ; for Rhaicos would 

not quit 
The solitary place, but moan'd and died. 

Hence milk and honey wonder not, O 

guest. 
To find set duly on the hollow stone. 



132 



FOUR ENGLISH SONGS 

SHAKESPEARE the dramatist 
looms so large on the stage of 
English literature that Shakespeare 
the lyric poet is overshadowed and 
thrust into the shade ; and yet in the 
poetry that is primarily musical and, 
so to speak, sings itself, the author 
of " Fidele," which Tennyson loved 
and which lay beside him on his 
death-bed, shows himself as much a 
master of the vocal resources of ver- 
sification as of its potencies of emo- 
tion, passion, and terror. In a few 
flowing lines the common destiny, 
the general pathos, of life are touched 
so lightly that they can hardly be 
called the burden of his song, for 
133 



Four English Songs 

they convey no sense of weight ; but 
not one of the many contrasts be- 
tween the place and power of the 
king as sovereign and his fragility as 
man in which the plays abound 
strikes a graver note. The common 
fate of the race could hardly be more 
tenderly and beautifully phrased. 
On the other hand, in the whole 
range of poetry there is not a lovelier 
morning song than " Hark ! hark ! 
the lark at heaven's gate sings," with 
its springing joy in awakening life, 
its jubilant welcome to the day in the 
rising of the lark, the setting forth 
of the sun, the opening of flowers, 
the happy call of love. The fresh- 
ness and fragrance of the birth of the 
world are in these exquisite lines ; so 
free from care or toil, so akin with 
the hour and the streaming life they 
sing. 

134 



Four English Songs 

Born thirty years later than Shake- 
speare and dying in 1674, Robert 
Herrick kept the singing quality 
through the storm of civil war and 
was silenced only by death. A pas- 
toral poet of very high rank, he is 
also a master of the lyric ; indeed, if 
called upon to name the most beguil- 
ing maker of pure song in English, 
most lovers of poetry would probably 
name Herrick. In an age opulent 
in lyrical genius, he alone among 
the singers lived the life of a poet, 
undisturbed by the tumult of the 
time. Crashaw, Carew, Lovelace, 
Cowley, Davenant, felt the malign 
influence of civil war ; Milton was 
lifted by its antagonisms as a bird 
rises against a strong wind, but the 
lyric joy of " L*Allegro " was no 
longer in the lonely soul of the author 
of "Paradise Lost." Herrick spent 



j> 



Four English Songs 

fourteen years in Cambridge and 
twenty in a Devonshire vicarage. A 
clergyman of pagan temper, a priest 
of classical taste and culture, he could 
write the " Hesperides " and " Noble 
Numbers" without any consciousness 
of incongruity. He was a belated 
heathen who had strayed into a pul- 
pit, but whose temperament and gen- 
ius were not subdued by the dim 
religious light in which he preached, 
nor his frankly sensuous habit of 
speech toned down by ecclesiastical 
propriety. He wrote more than 
twelve hundred poems, most of them 
short ; some of them mere snatches 
of song. In his study, it may be 
suspected, he read the classics oftener 
than the Fathers ; and in his garden 
he seems always to have been break- 
ing into little songs. And these lit- 
tle songs were the best of him;* 
136 




ROBERT HERRICK 



Four English Songs 

unforced, deliciously unconscious of 
official duties and dignity, they have 
the charm of perfect spontaneity, 
entire sincerity, overflowing spirits, 
untiring freshness of imagination, 
childlike joy in nature, in beauty, in 
life for its own sake, mastery of the 
liquid music of words. Herrick was 
a man of the earth, with a wonderful 
voice, who had strayed into a church 
and sang indifferently lyrics to old 
goddesses or hymns to the saints 
without any change of tune or temper. 
Mr. Gosse has said of the " Hesper- 
ides " that there is not a sunnier 
book in the world. " The poet sings, 
in short flights of song, of all that 
makes life gay and luxurious, of the 
freshness of a dewy field, of the 
fecundity and heat of harvest, of 
the odor and quietude of an autumn 

orchard." But life did not leave 
137 



Four English Songs 

Herrlck untouched by its monitions, 
and the lines " To Daffodils," sound 
this deeper note. 

The career of Richard Lovelace 
was in striking contrast with that of 
Robert Herrick. Born in i6i 8, two 
years after Shakespeare's death, he 
was for a time the darling of his gen- 
eration, often called the handsomest 
man of his age ; born to rank and 
wealth, of captivating manners, turn- 
ing with ease from the reading of 
Greek poetry to music and to feats 
of arms, early a favorite at Court, he 
was thrown later into prison, his be- 
trothed, thinking him dead, married 
another man, and after a few years of 
the recklessness that is born of de- 
spair he died in a cellar, in extreme 
destitution and in his early prime. 

Lovelace was a poet as he was a 
courtier, a scholar, and a soldier ; the 
138 



Four English Songs 

writing of verse was incidental in his 
adventurous and unregulated life. 
His work was stamped by haste and 
extreme carelessness ; he was often 
trivial, affected, and frivolous ; but 
there is a touch of gallantry, a heroic 
note, in his poetry as in his life. 
He had a manly temper, a loyal 
nature, and a command of the phrase 
that rings with conviction and re- 
strained emotion ; and these qualities 
made it possible for him to write two 
of the most spirited and noble songs 
in our language, and to give honor 
a definition which has become part 
of our common speech. The lines 
" To Althea from Prison " and " To 
Lucasta, on Going to the Wars,'* 
are to be counted among the finest 
English songs. 

The lyric is, of all poetic forms, 
nearest the heart of the world be- 
'39 



Four English Songs 

cause it is, at its best, simple in 
language, musical to the ear, and 
holds and conveys those experiences, 
passions, hopes and aspirations in 
which all men share. To the lyric 
has been committed the expression 
of all that is dearest to the heart 
of humanity : freedom, as Tyrtaeus, 
Korner, and Burns have sung it ; 
the rapture of youth and life as 
Shakespeare and Goethe have voiced 
them; the loveliness of nature as 
Theocritus, and the tranquil and 
penetrating truth of nature as Words- 
worth have found speech for them ; 
the mounting joy as Shelley sets it to 
music, and the mellow richness of 
the world as Keats evoked it in mag- 
ical phrase ; the tenderness and pathos 
and love of wife and child and home 
as Lowell and Whittier and Long- 
fellow and a great choir of poets of 
140 



Four English Songs 

all races and times have given them 
speech. 

The singing note in English poetry^ 
was heard oftenest between the birth 
of Shakespeare in 1554 and the death 
of Herrick in 1674. There were 
masters of musical verse before 
Shakespeare, and there have been 
many since Herrick, but they have 
not been primarily singing poets ; 
their verses have not seemed to be 
trembling on the verge of song. 
The verbal harmonies of Swinburne 
are as capacious and varied as any in 
literature, but they do not seem to be 
waiting for the composer to set them 
to music. In the century after 
Shakespeare's birth there was a joy 
in life which, in the face of tragedy 
on the stage and in affairs, was a 
common emotion among poets ; there 
was an unabashed delight in beauty in 
141 



Four English Songs 

nature and in women ; above all, there 
was an almost universal knowledge 
of music and skill in singing. The 
air was full of songs which were 
known to people of all classes ; prac- 
tically the whole populace could read 
music and sing it in parts at sight. 
Poetry and music were still mated, 
and words were coupled with notes 
almost instinctively. 

It was this singing habit of the 
English people, probably, that made 
the period from Shakespeare to Dry- 
den so rich in the poetry that trem- 
bles on the verge of music ; for in 
every period in which an art flowers 
with prodigal richness it is significant 
that, while the practice of it may be 
confined to a few, the love of it and 
joy in it are shared by the many. 
Our thoughtful, earnest, care-bur- 
dened age has produced noble medi- 
142 



Four English Songs 

tatlve poems like " In Memoriam," 
deeply felt and finely phrased poems 
like the " Commemoration Ode," 
rhapsodies charged v/ith imaginative 
power like " Out of the Cradle End- 
lessly Rocking," delicate and tender 
lyrics like Aldrich's *' Nocturne"; 
but its poets have rarely sung as the 
birds sing in the dawn, forgetful of 
the night that has gone and care-free 
of the day that has come. 



FIDELE 

Fear no more the heat o* the sun, 
Nor the furious winter's rages ; 

Thou thy worldly task hast done, 
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages 

Golden lads and girls all must, 

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 

Fear no more the frown o' the great, 
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke j 
H3 



Four English Songs 

Care no more to clothe and eat; 

To thee the reed is as the oak : 
The scepter, learning, physic, must 
All follow this, and come to dust. 

Fear no more the lightning-flash. 
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone ; 

Fear not slander, censure rash; 
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan : 

All lovers young, all lovers must 

Consign to thee, and come to dust. 



HARK! HARK! THE LARK 

Hark I hark I the lark at heaven's gate 
sings. 
And Phoebus 'gins arise. 
His steeds to water at those springs 

On chaliced flowers that lies; 
And winking May-buds begin 

To ope their golden eyes ; 
With everything that pretty bin, 
My lady sweet, arise ; 
Arise, arise. 

144 



Four English Songs 

TO DAFFODILS 

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see 

You haste away so soon : 
As yet the early-rising Sun 
Has not attain'd his noon. 
Stay, stay, 
Until the hasting day 

Has run 
But to the even-song ; 
And, having pray'd together, we 
Will go with you along. 

We have short time to stay, as you. 

We have as short a Spring ; 
As quick a growth to meet decay, 

As you, or any thing. 
We die. 

As your hours do, and dry 
Away 

Like to the Summer's rain ; 
Or as the pearls of morning's dew. 

Ne'er to be found again. 



10 145 



Four English Songs 



TO LUCASTA, ON GOING TO 
THE WARS 

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind. 

That from the nunnery 
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 

To war and arms I fly. 

True, a new mistress now I chase, 

The first foe in the field ; 
And with a stronger faith embrace 

A sword, a horse, a shield. 

Yet this inconstancy is such 

As you too shall adore ; 
I could not love thee. Dear, so much. 

Loved I not Honor more. 



146 



RICHARD CRASHAW 

IF leisure, peace, and prosperity of 
condition are favorable to the 
writing of poetry, Crashaw fell on 
evil days. He was born probably 
in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's 
death, and he died in 1650; his 
working years were few, and they 
were coincident with the rising storm 
which dethroned Charles 1 and 
silenced the choir of poets who at 
the close of the Shakespearean age 
made England a " nest of singing 
birds." Crashaw's career stopped 
short of the tragedy which overtook 
some of his most gifted contempo- 
raries ; it was not overhung with 
melancholy like Cowley's troubled 
H7 



Richard Crashaw 

life ; but it was spent largely in exile. 
The vicissitudes of his outward for- 
tunes appear, however, to have left 
no reflection in his inward life ; un- 
Hke most men of genius of his time, 
he seems to have escaped inward 
struggle and to have found in reli- 
gion the peace and joy which his 
country could not give him. 

The story of his life is brief, and 
so indistinct through lack of detail 
that it is a bit of tracery faintly dis- 
cernible on a fading surface. Born 
about 1616, the son of a clergyman 
eminent enough to be a preacher at 
the Temple, Crashaw began his edu- 
cation at the Charterhouse, with its 
fine sixteenth-century hall, its great 
staircase, and its later memories of 
Colonel Newcome ; the school within 
whose gates an ancient quiet still 
lingers in the heart of the oldest 
148 



Richard Crashaw 

London. In 1632 he was elected a 
Fellow of Pembroke College, Cam- 
bridge, whose ivy-covered inner walls 
and beautiful garden give it a unique 
place in that city of colleges. Five 
years later he moved across the street 
and became a Fellow in Peterhouse. 
Both these colleges are small and 
picturesque, and both are associated 
with Edmund Spenser. In 1641 he 
was admitted to a degree, probably 
that of Master of Arts. In 1644 ^ 
number of Fellows, of whom Cra- 
shaw was one, were expelled from 
the University because they refused 
to sign the Covenant imposed by 
Parliament. Crashaw entered the 
Roman Catholic Church, and a little 
later went to Paris, where he endured 
great hardships like many young 
Englishmen in exile in different 
parts of Europe. Cowley found him 
149 



Richard Crashaw 

in destitution, and presented him to 
the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria, 
who gave him aid and letters of intro- 
duction to influential people in Rome. 
In Rome he found employment as 
secretary to a Cardinal, and later 
secured an appointment as a Canon 
of the Church of Loretto ; in this 
service he died in 1650. 

Little is known about Crashaw's 
personality, but the fact that he had 
the friendship of Cowley and Selden 
counts for much. In the preface to 
the original edition of his works it is 
said, with some ardor of style, that 
his " Steps to the Temple " was 
written while at Peterhouse, where 
" he made his nest more gladly than 
David's swallow near the house of 
God : where, like a primitive saint, 
he offered more prayers in the night 
than others usually offer in the day *' ; 
150 



Richard CrashaW 

that he knew Hebrew, Greek, Latin, 
Italian, and Spanish, and had skill in 
music, drawing, limning, graving ; 
that he had rare moderation in diet ; 
that " he never created a Muse out 
of distempers, nor, with our Canary- 
scribblers, cast any strange mists of 
surfeits before the intellectual beams 
of his mind or memory." If this high- 
flown sentence means to convey the 
impression that he was free from the 
passion for conceits and far-fetched 
similies to which many of his contem- 
poraries were victims, it must be taken 
as an expression of friendship rather 
than an exact characterization. There 
is no reason to doubt Crashaw*s piety, 
but his well-known lines to an imagin- 
ary mistress of his heart beginning 

" Whoever she be, 
That not too impossible she, 
That shall command my heart and me," 

151 



Richard Crashaw 

and a little group of pieces on " The 
Delights of the Muses," indicate 
that his sainthood was not without 
the relief of very human emotions. 
The contents of the group of little 
volumes in which his poems origi- 
nally appeared, now very rare, can 
be compressed into a single book of 
moderate size, divided under the 
titles : " Steps to the Temple," " The 
Delights of the Muses," " Sacred 
Poems," " Poemata Latina," and 
" Epigrammata Sacra." 

Crashaw had both religious and 
poetic feeling, and in his happiest 
moments touched his work with the 
power of sincerity and the grace of 
imagination ; at his best he shows 
capacity for an inspiration that lifted 
him above the affectations and arti- 
ficialities of his age. But his critical 
sense did not save him from gross 
152 



Richard Crashaw 

absurdities and far-fetched conceits. 
He did not write academic exercises 
as often as did Cowley, of whom 
Dryden said : " He could never for- 
give any conceit which came in his 
way, but swept like a drag-net great 
and small/* The poet in Crashaw 
often put the pedant to sudden 
flight; in a long-sustained, weari- 
some, and most unpoetic declama- 
tion to the effect that the arrow of a 
seraph could not inflame the heart 
of Saint Theresa he rises abruptly 
into the region of poetry in these 
striking lines : 

" O thou undaunted daughter of desires ! 
By all the dower of lights and fires, 
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, 
By all thy lives and deaths of love. 
By thy large draughts of intellectual day. 
And by thy thirsts of love more large 
than they ; 

153 



Richard CrashaW 

By all thy brim-fiird bowls of fierce 

desire, 
Bv thy last morning's draught of liquid 

fire, 
By the full kingdom of that final kiss 
That seiz'd thy parting soul, and seal'd 

thee His ; 
By all the Heav'n thou hast In Him, 
Fair sister of the Seraphim ! 
By all of Him we have in thee. 
Leave nothing of myself in me : 
Let me so read thy life that I 
Unto all life of mine may die." 

Often diffuse and given to repeti- 
tion ; writing, as Pope said, like a 
gentleman for his own amusement, 
Crashaw can charge an artificial form 
with real feeling and give it the inter- 
est of ingenious imagination. When 
he escaped from " fustian imitation 
of brocade,** he was capable of a 
certain nobility and even splendor 
of thought and diction, and rose in a 

154 



Richard Crashaw 

few passages to passionate eloquence 
of style. " A Hymn of the Nativity, 
Sung by the Shepherds," is quaint 
after the manner of its time, and not 
free from conceits, but it has touches 
of tenderness and beauty which en- 
title it to a place among the true 
Christmas Hymns of English poetry. 

QUEM VIDISTIS PASTORES, ETC. 

A Hymn of the Nati-vity, sung by the Shepherds 

Chorus 

Come, we shepherds whose blest sight 
Flath met Love's noon in Nature's night ; 
Come, lift we up our loftier song, 
And wake the sun that lies too long. 

To all our world of well-stol'n joy 

He slept, and dreamt of no such thing. 

While we found out Heaven's fairer eye, 
And kiss'd the cradle of our King; 

Tell him he rises now too late 

To show us aught worth looking at, 

155 



Richard Crashaw 

Tell him we now can show him more 
Than he e'er show'd to mortal sight, 

Than he himself e'er saw before, 
Which to be seen needs not his light : 

Tell him, Tityrus, where th' hast been. 

Tell him, Thyrsis, what th' hast seen. 

Tityrus 

Gloomy night embraced the place 

Where the noble infant lay : 
The babe look'd up, and show'd His face 

In spite of darkness it was day. 
It was Thy day, sweet, and did rise. 
Not from the East, but from Thy eyes. 
Chorus. It was Thy day, sweet, etc. 

Thyrsis 

Winter chid aloud, and sent 

The angry North to wage his wars : 
The North forgot his fierce intent. 

And left perfumes instead of scars. 
By those sweet eyes' persuasive powers. 
Where he meant frosts he scattered 
flowers. 

Chorus, By those sweet eyes', etc. 
156 



Richard Crashaw 



Both 



We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest, 
Young dawn of our eternal day ; 

We saw Thine eyes break from the East, 
And chase the trembling shades away : 

We saw Thee, and we blest the sight. 

We saw Thee by thine own sweet light. 

TiTYRUS 

Poor world, said I, what wilt thou do 
To entertain this starry stranger ? 

Is this the best thou canst bestow — 
A cold and not too cleanly manger ? 

Contend, the powers of heaven and earth. 

To fit a bed for this huge birth. 

Chorus, Contend, the powers, etc. 

Thyrsis 

Proud world, said I, cease your contest. 
And let the mighty babe alone; 

The phoenix builds the phoenix* nest, 
Lovers architecture is His own. 
157 



Richard Crashaw 

The babe, whose birth embraves this morn 
Made His own bed ere He was born. 

Chorus. The babe, whose birth, etc. 

TiTYRUS 

I saw the curl'd drops, soft and slow. 
Come hovering o'er the place's head, 

OfF'ring their whitest sheets of snow 
To furnish the fair infant's bed. 

Forbear, said I, be not too bold. 

Your fleece is white, but 't is too cold. 

Thyrsis 

I saw th' obsequious seraphim 
Their rosy fleece of fire bestow. 

For well they now can spare their wings. 
Since Heaven itself lies here below. 

Well done, said I ; but are you sure 

Your down, so warm, will pass for pure ? 
Chorus. Well done, said I, etc. 

Both 

No, no, your King 's not yet to seek 
Where to repose His royal head ; 

158 



Richard Crashaw 

See, see how soon His new-bloom'd cheek 
'Twixt mother's breasts is gone to bed. 
Sweet choice, said we, no way but so, 
Not to lie cold, yet sleep in snow ! 

Chorus. Sweet choice, said we, etc. 

Full Chorus 

Welcome all wonders in one sight ! 

Eternity shut in a span ! 
Summer in winter ! day in night ! 

Chorus 

Heaven in earth ! and God in man ! 
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth 
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to 
earth ! 

Welcome, tho' nor to gold, nor silk, 
To more than Caesar's birthright is : 

Two sister sees of virgin's milk. 
With many a rarely temper'd kiss. 

That breathes at once both maid and 
mother. 

Warms in the one, cools in the other, 

^S9 



Richard Crashaw 

She sings Thy tears asleep, and dips 
Her kisses in Thy weeping eye ; 

She spreads the red leaves of Thy lips. 
That in their buds yet blushing lie. 

She 'gainst those mother diamonds tries 

The points of her young eagle's eyes.-^ 

Welcome — tho' not to those gay flies, 
Gilded i' th' beams of earthly kings, 

Slippery souls in smiling eyes — 

But to poor shepherds, homespun things, 

Whose wealth 's their flocks, whose wit 's 
to be 

Well read in their simplicity. 

Yet, when young April's husband show'rs 

Shall bless the fruitful Maia's bed. 
We '11 bring the first-born of her flowers. 
To kiss Thy feet, and crown Thy head. 
To Thee, dread Lamb ! whose love must 
keep 
The shepherds while they feed their 
sheep. 

* This verse is not in the version of the Paris edition of 1 6 5 2« 
160 



Richard Crashaw 

To Thee, meek Majesty, soft King 
Of simple graces and sweet loves ! 

Each of us his lamb will bring, 
Each his pair of silver doves ! 

At last, in fire of Thy fair eyes. 

Ourselves become our own best sacrifice ! 



II i6i 



TWO FAMOUS BALLADS 



^ I ^HERE is no better way of 
3l bringing into view the special 
qualities of the ballad than by placing 
it in contrast with the sonnet. The 
sonnet is the work of an individual ; 
it is a piece of calculated, self-con- 
scious composition ; it is written to 
be read by the eye ; it deals with an 
emotion, a thought, an image ; its 
form is sharply defined and is im- 
posed with the weight of a law on its 
writer ; it is, in a word, the most 
individual form of expression of a 
period in which literary self-conscious- 
ness has become acute and sensitive. 
The ballad, on the other hand, is 
not, in its older forms, the work of 
162 



Two Famous Ballads 

an individual ; it is impersonal ; it 
was often, beyond doubt, the expres- 
sion of a spontaneous impulse, and 
devoid of conscious or premeditated 
effect; it was recited or sung, never 
written ; it told a story either in a 
striking incident or a series of inci- 
dents ; it was addressed to an audi- 
ence, and was heard and not read ; it 
had great flexibility of form. The 
sonnet is the creation of trained 
writers in a sophisticated age, using 
an exacting form of verse with the 
most careful prevision of artistic 
effects ; the ballad was the composi- 
tion of untrained men in a simple 
society, using a flexible verse form 
with no sense of authority or re- 
straint. 

The delight with which the ballad 
and other forms of folk literature 
were received when they were, so to 
163 



Two Famous Ballads 

speak, rediscovered has been felt 
afresh in every succeeding generation, 
because these older forms of compo- 
sition are so far removed in inspira- 
tion, substance, and form from the 
spirit and methods of modern writ- 
ing ; because they are so fresh in 
feehng and in phrase, so naive and 
direct, so objective and broad in 
treatment. Contrast the story of 
Barbara Allen, which the forerunners 
of the people who now read the 
"yellow'' journals once knew by 
heart, with Maeterlinck's " Seven 
Princesses " and the simplicity and 
ingenuous veracity of the song stand 
out in striking relief If the famous 
ballad of " The Hunting of the 
Cheviot," of which Sidney said that 
it moved his heart " more than with 
a trumpet," is placed beside Mae- 
terlinck's impressive drama, "The 
164 



Two Famous Ballads 

Blind," how bold and sharp become 
the outlines of the old story, how 
devoid it is of atmosphere and sym- 
bolism, on what a rushing current its 
action is swept along ! 

The ballad is entirely impersonal 
and objective ; it bears no trace of 
authorship, rarely of design. The 
balladist thought only of his story, 
never of himself. He had no view 
of life to convey, no moral to en- 
force ; he was a reporter with a vivid 
sense of reality and a natural gift of 
narration. He was rarely an artist 
in the sense of getting the most subtle 
effects out of his material ; but he 
often had the great gifts of sincerity, 
spontaneity, and graphic description. 
The ballad was the natural expression 
of an unsophisticated age and an un- 
educated people. It was born when 
culture was a little capital of distilled 
165 



Two Famous Ballads 

knowledge in a few hands ; it was 
democratic in spirit and substance, 
and popular in form. The stories 
which it told were common property ; 
they were the joint possession of the 
entire community; ev^erybody knew 
them and was more or less moved by 
them. In a very real though not in 
a rigidly exact sense, the ballads were 
the creations of communities rather 
than of individuals. Speaking of 
the primitive times which antedated 
written literature and produced a rich 
growth of legends, fairy stories, folk- 
tales. Herder said : " Poetry in those 
happy days lived in the ears of the 
people, on the lips and in the hearts 
of singing bards; it sang of history, 
of the events of the day, of myster- 
ies, miracles, and signs. It was the 
flower of a nation*s character, lan- 
guage, and country ; of its occupa- 
i66 



Two Famous Ballads 

tions, its prejudices, its passions, its 
aspirations, and its soul." 

In emphasizing the common capital 
of experience and history upon which 
all poets of this primitive period drew 
with entire freedom. Herder brings 
out one of the two elements of what 
may be called communal as contrasted 
with individual authorship in the 
modern sense. But the communal 
element becomes more definite when 
the conditions under which the ballad 
was composed are brought into view. 
Imagine a community made up of 
people who had never traveled, who 
were largely shut off from the world, 
who were of substantially the same 
grade of society, who could neither 
read nor write and had no books ; 
but who had imagination, passion, 
curiosity, the love of life, and a keen 
sense of its comedy and tragedy. The 
167 



Two Famous Ballads 

people in this community had been 
told in childhood stories of war, of 
private vengeance, of love, of adven- 
ture. They had no histories or 
novels, but they knew by heart a 
great number of these actual or 
imaginary happenings ; and among 
themselves the usual dramas of love 
and hate and sacrifice were continually 
enacted. Here, in a word, were all 
the materials but none of the mechan- 
ism of literature. Here also were 
men and women of vivid feeling, 
quick imagination, dramatic power. 
When these people came together, 
they shared with all men the instinct 
for rhythmical movement, the dance 
impulse which is as old as the race ; 
they shared also the singing impulse ; 
for both these impulses are funda- 
mentally social. The dance needs a 
leader, and the singer an audience. 
i68 



Two Famous Ballads 

The stimulus of company and ap- 
plause fired the man of reponsive 
imagination; he put a story or an 
incident known to them all in verse 
form, for improvisation was common 
and easily becomes a habit when the 
practice of it is widespread. The 
singer who, on the spur of the mo- 
ment, made his song as he went 
along, moved his audience to join in 
a chorus ; or perhaps some other 
singer sprang to his feet and added a 
verse, or a dozen verses. The song 
went home to the hearts of the 
simple people; it gained what we 
call popularity. It was still, how- 
ever, in a fluid state; the original 
composer had no thought of owner- 
ship in connection with it; it was 
common property, to be changed, 
enlarged, modified at every singing. 
When it had gained a fairly com- 
169 



Two Famous Ballads 

plete form, it was handed down orally 
from generation to generation, sub- 
ject to the inevitable gains and losses 
of that form of transmission. Even 
when a man of natural gifts of song 
composed a complete ballad, it passed 
out of his keeping, and suffered 
many changes as it was handed down 
to a later period. For this reason 
there are many texts of the popular 
ballads, but there is no text. 

Of the two ballads reprinted in this 
collection, " Barbara Allen's Cruelty " 
secured a great and lasting popularity. 
Writing of his childhood, Goldsmith 
says : " The music of the finest 
singer is dissonance to what I felt 
when our old dairymaid sang me 
into tears with * Johnny Armstrong's 
Last Good-Night, or the Cruelty of 
Barbara Allen.'" "Robin Hood 

and Allen-a-Dale " is one of the 

170 



Two Famous Ballads 

most humorous and effective of the 
long list of songs which celebrate 
the audacities, adventures, and rol- 
licking life "under the greenwood 
tree " of the most popular hero with 
whom the imagination of the country 
people of England ever concerned 
itself. 

BARBARA ALLEN'S CRUELTY 

All in the merry month of May, 

When green buds they were swelling, 

Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay, 
For love o' Barbara Allen. 

He sent his man unto her then, 

To the town where she was dwelling : 

" O haste and come to my master dear. 
If your name be Barbara Allen." 

Slowly, slowly rase she up. 

And she cam* where he was lying ; 
And when she drew the curtain by, 

Says, "Young man, I think you *re 
dying." 

171 



Two Famous Ballads 

" O it 's I am sick, and very, very sick. 
And it 's a* for Barbara Allen.** 

" O the better for me ye'se never be, 
Tho' your heart's blude were a-spilling ! 

" O dinna ye min*, young man,** she says, 
" When the red wine ye were filling. 

That ye made the healths gae round and 
round 
And ye slighted Barbara Allen ? '* 

He turn*d his face unto the wa' 
And death was wi* him dealing : 

" Adieu, adieu, my dear friends a* ; 
Be kind to Barbara Allen.** 

As she was walking o*er the fields, 
She heard the dead-bell knelling ; 

And every jow the dead-bell gave. 
It cried, " Woe to Barbara Allen ! *' 

" O mother, mother, mak* my bed, 

To lay me down in sorrow. 
My love has died for me to-day, 

I *11 die for him to-morrow.** 
172 



Two Famous Ballads 

ROBIN HOOD AND ALLEN-A-DALE 

Come listen to me, you gallants so free, 
All you that love mirth for to hear, 

And I will tell you of a bold outlaw. 
That lived in Nottinghamshire. 

As Robin Hood in the forest stood. 
All under the greenwood tree. 

There he was aware of a brave young 
man. 
As fine as fine might be. 

The youngster was clad in scarlet red, 

In scarlet fine and gay ; 
And he did frisk it over the plain, 

And chaunted a roundelay. 

As Robin Hood next morning stood 

Amongst the leaves so gay, 
There did he espy the same young man 

Come drooping along the way. 

The scarlet he wore the day before 

It was clean cast away ; 
And at every step he fetched a sigh, 

" Alas ! and a well-a-day ! " 
173 



Two Famous Ballads 

Then stepped forth brave Little John, 
And iMidge, the miller's son ; 

Which made the young man bend his bow, 
When as he see them come. 

"Stand off! stand off!" the young man 
said, 
" What is your will with me ? " 
" You must come before our master 
straight. 
Under yon greenwood tree." 

And when he came bold Robin before, 
Robin asked him courteously, 

" O, hast thou any money to spare, 
For my merry men and me ? " 

" I have no money," the young man said, 
" But five shillings and a ring ; 

And that I have kept this seven long years, 
To have at my wedding." 

" Yesterday I should have married a maid. 

But she was from me ta'en. 
And chosen to be an old knight's delight. 

Whereby my poor heart is slain." 

174 



Two Famous Ballads 

" What is thy name ? " then said Robin 
Hood, 
" Come tell me, without any fail." 
" By the faith of my body," then said the 
young man, 
" My name it is Allen-a-Dale." 

" What wilt thou give me," said Robin 
Hood, 

" In ready gold or fee, 
To help thee to thy true love again, 

And deliver her unto thee ? " 

" I have no money," then quoth the young 
man, 

" No ready gold nor fee. 
But I will swear upon a book 

Thy true servant for to be." 

" How many miles is it to thy true 
love ? 
Come tell me without guile." 
" By the faith of my body," then said the 
young man, 
" It is but five little mile." 

175 



Two Famous Ballads 

Then Robin he hasted over the plain, 

He did neither stint nor lin, 
Until he came unto the church 

Where Allen should keep his weddin*. 

" What hast thou here ? " the bishop then 
said, 

" I prithee now tell unto me." 
" I am a bold harper," quoth Robin Hood, 

" And the best in the north country." 

" O welcome, O welcome," the bishop 

he said, 
" That music best pleaseth me." 
" You shall have no music," quoth Robin 

Hood, 
" 'Till the bride and bridegroom I see." 

With that came in a wealthy knight, 
Which was both grave and old ; 

And after him a finikin lass 

Did shine like the glistering gold. 

" This is not a fit match," quoth Robin 
Hood, 
" That you do seem to make here j 

176 



Two Famous Ballads 

For since we are come into the church, 
The bride shall chuse her own dear." 

The Robin Hood put his horn to his 
mouth, 

And blew blasts two and three ; 
When four-and-twenty bowmen bold 

Came leaping over the lea. 

And when they came into the church- 
yard. 

Marching all in a row. 
The first man was AUen-a-Dale, 

To give bold Robin his bow. 

" This is thy true love," Robin he said, 
" Young Allen, as I hear say ; 

And you shall be married this same time. 
Before we depart away." 

« That shall not be," the bishop he cried, 

" For thy word shall not stand ; 
They shall be three times asked in the 
church. 
As the law is of our land." 
12 177 



Two Famous Ballads 

Robin Hood pulled off the bishop's coat, 
And put it upon Little John ; 

" By the faith of my body," then Robin 
said, 
" This cloth doth make thee a man." 

When Little John went into the quire, 

The people began to laugh ; 
He asked them seven times into church. 

Lest three times should not be enough. 

" Who gives me this maid ? " said Little 
John. 

Quoth Robin Hood, " That do I ; 
And he that takes her from Allen-a-Dale, 

Full dearly he shall her buy." 

And then having ended this merry wedding. 
The bride looked like a queen ; 

And so they returned to the merry green- 
wood. 
Amongst the leaves so green. 



178 



SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 

^ I ^HE sonnet to which Petrarch 
JL gave a standard form in Italy 
consisted of an octave, or group of 
eight lines, and a sextet, or group of 
six lines ; all the lines being decasyl- 
labic. The sonnet as used by Shake- 
speare consists of three quatrains, or 
groups of four lines each, with a 
couplet. This modification of the 
Petrarchian sonnet did not originate 
with Shakespeare ; but his genius gave 
it the stamp of supreme authority 
among English poets. The half- 
century between Surrey and Shake- 
speare had been rich in English 
sonnets, and the impulse to use this 

particular form seemed to reach its 
179 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

height about 1594. The sonnet of 
Petrarch exacted a high degree of 
skill and had often the interest of a 
delicate and veiled confession ; a re- 
pository of personal feeling or ex- 
perience protected by its technical 
difficulties from those who had not 
served a novitiate in the art of versifi- 
cation. It is true, men to whom the 
felicities of verse-making were as 
foreign as the vivid emotions of the 
great poets wrote sonnets in large 
numbers ; but the key of the sonnet 
was never out of the hands of the 
elect. They charged it with the 
tenderest friendship, the most pas- 
sionate love, the adoration of beauty 
and virtue, the worship of women. 

In an age in which expression was 
the main thing and publication a mat- 
ter of subordinate interest; when, in 
most cases, publication in any form 
180 



Shakespeare*s Sonnets 

was avoided and resented, great num- 
bers of sonnets in manuscript passed 
from hand to hand and were read and 
reread with keen appreciation of the 
most elusive subtleties of thought 
or form, by the elect spirits of a time 
in which writing was an art without 
business connections. Many of these 
unprinted sonnets in this way became 
known to a large circle and reports 
of their excellence reached the outer 
world. 

This was probably what happened 
to Shakespeare's sonnets. There is 
evidence that they were written be- 
tween 1593 and 1598 ; in the " Pal- 
ladio Tamia," published in 1598, 
there is a reference to Shakespeare's 
"sug'r'd Sonnets among his private 
friends." They were the product 
of the dramatist's lyrical period, when 
the poetic was stronger than the 
181 



Shakespeare*s Sonnets 

dramatic impulse, and " Venus and 
Adonis," " Romeo and Juliet," the 
" Rape of Lucrece," and " A Mid- 
summer Night's Dream" were the 
first fruits of his awakening poetic 
genius. The sonnets were published 
by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, prob- 
ably without the consent of the poet, 
possibly without his knowledge. The 
dedication of the poems to " Mr. 
W. H.," which has been the prolific 
source of conjectures, speculations, 
and discussion, was made by the 
publisher, not by the poet; and the 
problem, which has a curious interest 
only, remains to tease the minds of 
those to whom a puzzle is more 
fascinating than a poem. 

The sonnets, of which there are 
one hundred and fifty-four, form a 
sonnet sequence after the manner 
of Rossetti's "House of Life" or 



Ib2 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the 
Portuguese," and are unified by two 
principal themes or motives : a highly- 
idealized or poetized friendship for 
a young man of singular charm of 
nature and beauty of person, and a 
passionate love for a " dark woman " : 

"Two loves I have of comfort and 
despair, 
Which like two angels do suggest one 
still ; 
The better angel is a man right fair, 
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill." 

To this noble friend, endowed with 
youth, distinction of form and nature, 
rank and fortune, one hundred and 
twenty-six sonnets are addressed ; to 
a woman dark in coloring, treacherous 
in nature, stained in character, but 
with a certain power of sorcery, the 
remaining twenty -eight are addressed. 
183 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

Smaller divisions or groups of these 
poems may be made recording dis- 
tinct phases in the working out of 
these two dramas of subjective expe- 
rience. The sonnets reflect with ex- 
traordinary clearness the moods and 
feeling of the Elizabethan period : its 
power of sustained idealization of per- 
sons or virtues, its passion for high- 
flown imaginative adoration, its love 
of classical allusion and far-fetched 
imagery, its capacity for elaborate 
creation in the region of pure fantasy. 
The Elizabethans had a marvelous 
combination of imaginative inventive- 
ness and seriousness of manner in 
enveloping real persons with the at- 
mosphere of ideality, and in drama- 
tizing imaginary emotions ; and these 
qualities must not be forgotten in 
dealing with the poetry of this 
period. Mr. Lee has made clear the 
184 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

liberal use of the sonnet as a poetic 
exercise in Shakespeare's time, and 
its extraordinary vogue as a highly 
specialized form of verse employed 
often in a purely conventional way 
to record experiences which were 
entirely fanciful. 

But while it is perilous to read 
Shakespeare's sonnets as a chapter of 
personal history and to accept them 
as a veiled confession of the most 
impersonal of writers, it is not easy 
to ignore the note of experience in 
them. It is highly improbable that 
a man of Shakespeare's objectivity of 
expression would lay his heart bare 
In a literal recital of his emotional 
experiences ; but the Intensity of feel- 
ing in the sonnets makes it diffi- 
cult to believe that they are merely 
poetic exercises, skillful modulations 
of emotion by a supreme artist amus- 
185 



Shakespeare*s Sonnets 

ing himself with a display of his 
almost magical skill. 

" The truth probably lies between 
these two extremes of interpretation ; 
it seems probable that the sonnets 
are disclosures of the poet*s experi- 
ence without being transcriptions of 
his actual history ; that they embody 
the fruits of a great experience with- 
out revealing that experience in its 
historic order. Literal, consecutive 
recitals of fact the sonnets are not, 
but they are autobiographic in the 
only way in which a poet of Shake- 
speare's spirit and training, living in 
his period, could make his art the 
vehicle of autobiography : they use 
the material which experience had 
deposited in Shakespeare's nature, 
while they hide the actual happenings 
in his life behind the veil of an elab- 
orate art and of a philosophy with 
i86 



Shakespeare*s Sonnets 

which the thought of western Europe 
was saturated at the time. The son- 
nets may be read as a poetic record 
of an emotional experience which left 
lasting traces behind it, and as a dis- 
closure of the mind of the poet ; but 
they cannot safely be read as an exact 
record of fact. The poet, as Shelley 
suggests, was willing to intrust his 
secret to those who had the wit to 
understand it." 

The sonnets reprinted here are se- 
lected with no reference to sequence 
or subject, but solely with reference 
to their supreme beauty as poetry. 
Shakespeare gave the sonnet as it 
came to him increased freedom and 
flexibility, and within the narrow 
compass of fourteen lines conveyed 
a wealth of thought with a vividness 
of imagination, imagery, and diction 
possible only to a great poet in his 
187 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

most fortunate moments. His son- 
nets vary greatly in inspiration and in 
art; in many cases they are marred 
by the faults of the period — forced 
imagery, extravagance of diction, arti- 
ficiality and elaboration of expression ; 
many of them, on the other hand, 
show that perfect blending of thought, 
imagination, feeling, and form which 
registers the highest reaches of poetic 
achievement ; and they are rich in 
those inimitable phrases which bear 
the superscription of the king and 
furnish the standards of value for the 
readers of poetry. 



i88 



Shakespeare*s Sonnets 

SONNET XVIII 

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate : 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of 

May, 
And summer's lease hath all too short a 

date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd ; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines. 
By chance or nature's changing course un- 

trimm'd ; 
But thy eternal summer shall not fade. 
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; 
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his 

shade. 
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: 
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can 

see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to 

thee. 



189 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

SONNET XXX 

When to the sessions of sweet silent 

thought 
I summon up remembrance of things past, 
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 
And with old woes new wail my dear time's 

waste : 
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow. 
For precious friends hid in death's dateless 

night, 
And weep afresh love's long since cancel'd 

woe, 
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd 

sight : 
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er 
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, 
Which I new pay as if not paid before. 
But if the while I think on thee, dear 

friend. 
All losses are restored and sorrows end. 



190 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 



SONNET LXXIII 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold 
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do 

hang 
Upon those boughs which shake against the 

cold, 
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet 

birds sang. 
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day 
As after sunset fadeth in the west ; 
Which by and by black night doth take 

away, 
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire. 
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie. 
As the death-bed whereon it must expire. 
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd 

by. 

This thou perceivest, which makes thy 

love more strong. 
To love that well which thou must leave 

ere long. 



IQI 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

SONNET XCVIII 

From you have I been absent in the spring, 
When proud-pied April, dressM in all his 

trim. 
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, 
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with 

him. 
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet 

smell 
Of different flowers in odor and in hue. 
Could make me any summer's story tell. 
Or from their proud lap pluck them where 

they grew : 
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white. 
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ; 
They were but sweet, but figures of delight. 
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. 
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, 
As with your shadow I with these did 

play. 



192 



Shakespeare's Sonnets 

SONNET CXVI 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
Admit impediments. Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove : 
O, no ! it is an ever-fixed mark, 
That looks on tempests and is never 

shaken; 
It is the star to every wandering bark, 
Whose worth 's unknown, although his 

height be taken. 
Love 's not time's fool, though rosy lips and 

cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and 

weeks. 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
If this be error and upon me proved, 
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 



'3 193 



TENNYSON'S ULYSSES 

T is safe to venture the prediction 
that, however Tennyson's work 
may be reduced in bulk by Time, that 
dispassionate and inexorable editor, 
the lines entitled " Ulysses ** will sur- 
vive all changes of taste and hold 
their place in English verse of the 
highest class. The poem has not only 
rare beauty and distinction but is the 
expression of the poet's genius on the 
highest level of achievment. It was 
composed in his earliest prime, and 
the morning air is upon it ; a certain 
freshness, vigor, and spirited move- 
ment modulated and tempered by 
the classical sense of disciplined and 
ordered power. 

194 



Tennyson*s Ulysses 

There never was a time in Tenny- 
son*s life when he was not a poet ; 
from the earliest hour of childhood 
in the rectory at Somersby, in Lin- 
colnshire, where a group of children 
of noble beauty made life a game of 
the imagination, to the hour when he 
fell asleep, the burden of years on his 
body but not on his spirit, "Cymbe- 
line " lying by his hand. At fourteen 
the whole world seemed to be dark- 
ened for him by the death of Byron. 
Three years later, in company with 
his brother Charles, he published a 
slender volume entitled " Poems by 
Two Brothers," the opening lines of 
which read : 

"'Tis sweet to lead from stage to stage, 
Like infancy to a maturer age ; " 

a curious prediction of that power of 

growth which was the law of life to 

«95 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

Tennyson and which he registered 
with striking clearness in his work. 
In 1829 his poem " Timbuctoo " won 
the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge, 
and a year later another slender vol- 
ume of " Poems, Chiefly Lyrical," 
attested his industry and his faith in 
his genius. Those who read these 
early verses with a hospitable mind 
found them delicate finger-work on 
the keys of speech rather than records 
of poetic thought. The little volume 
of 1832 had more to say, for the sen- 
sitive touch was beginning to evoke 
exquisite music, as " The Lady of 
Shalott," " ^none," " The Palace of 
Art," and "The Miller's Daughter" 
indubitably showed. Here was verse 
of singular freshness of feeling for 
landscape, and purity of sentiment ; 
how far this master of flowing melody 
would go was another matter. 
196 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

All doubts were silenced when the 
two volumes of " Poems *' appeared 
in 1842, and the world read " Ulys- 
ses," " Locksley Hall," " Dora," " A 
Vision of Sin," " The Two Voices," 
and heard for the first time the per- 
fect music of" Break, Break, Break," 
in which the sea itself seems to sweep 
with melancholy surge through the 
narrow channel of a personal grief. 
The master of the delicate music of 
vowels and consonants, the artist of 
exquisite sensibility, had become a 
poet. Edward Fitzgerald, who read 
the poems in advance of publication, 
wrote to a friend : 

Poor Tennyson has got home some of 
his proof-sheets, and now that his verses 
are in hard print, he thinks them detest- 
able. There is much I had always told 
him of his great fault of being too full and 
complicated — which he now sees or fancies 
197 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

he sees, and wishes he had never been per- 
suaded to print. But with all his faults, he 
will publish such a volume as has never 
been published since the time of Keats, 
and which, once published, will never be 
suffered to die. This is my prophecy, for 
I live before Posterity. 

This was a bold prediction from 
one of the oldest of friends, who was 
also one of the frankest of critics, but 
it has already had abundant confirma- 
tion. Even Carlyle, whose mood in 
the presence of contemporary poetry 
was usually the blackness of thick 
darkness, wrote : 

I have just been reading your Poems ; I 
have read certain of them over again, and 
mean to read them over and over till they 
become my poems ; this fact, with the in- 
ferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis 
in me^ I cannot keep it to myself, but must 
needs acquaint you too with it. If you 
198 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

knew what my relation has been to the 
thing call'd English " Poetry '* for many 
years back, you would think such fact 
almost surprising ! Truly it is long since 
in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I 
have felt the pulse of a real man's heart as 
I do in this same. 

In the decade that had passed since 
the publication of "The Miller's 
Daughter" and"TheLadyofShalott" 
Tennyson had not only studied his 
craft with the minuteness and insight 
of an artist sensitive to its most elusive 
and haunting effects, but he had drunk 
deep of the cup of sorrow. He had 
learned that power in the use of words 
lies largely in restraint, that depth of 
thought is reflected in clearness of 
statement, and passion in intensity 
not of emotion but of feeling, and 
that the harp yields its finer melodies 
to the hand that has mastered its 
199 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

strings with patient regard for the 
minute perfections that sink invisible 
in the achievement which they alone 
make possible. And this exquisite art 
had gained depth and power under 
the discipline of life. " ' Ulysses/ " 
Tennyson wrote, " was written soon 
after Arthur Hallam's death, and 
gave my feeling about the need of 
going forward and braving the strug- 
gle of life perhaps more simply than 
anything in * In Memoriam.' " 

Here, clearly, is the motive of 
" Ulysses " : the steadfast facing of 
life, the ringing response to its appeal 
to the strong soul, the resolute hoisting 
of the sail on the great adventure. It 
records the spirit of the brave antique 
world, uncertain what lies below the 
dip of the sea, but ready to face what- 
ever fate awaits the heroic heart in any 
world. The impulse that sent Ulysses 



200 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

restless and tireless through the 
" Iliad " and " Odyssey " was not 
drained by war and wandering ; for 
such as he, in whom the tide of 
vitality rises to the flood, life is not ac- 
complishment but adventure. Ithaca 
holds no relaxing rest of age for one 
whose will sets time at defiance, and 
sooner or later the imagination of the 
race was certain to summon the great 
adventurer to the rushing sea once 
more. 

In the "Odyssey" the ghost of 
Tiresias draws aside the curtain of the 
future for Ulysses, foretells his safe 
return to Ithaca, the vengeance that 
will fall from his hand on the base 
suitors of his wife, and predicts an- 
other and more mysterious voyage : 

" . . . then take a shapely oar 
And journey on, until thou meet with men 
Who hav e not known the sea nor eaten food 

20I 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

Seasoned with salt, nor ever have beheld 
Galleys with crimson prows, nor shapely 

oars. 
Which are the wings of ships." 

And when Virgil and Dante come 
upon Diomed and Ulysses together 
in the " Inferno," the much-experi- 
enced wanderer describes this final 
voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules 
whence no man " farther onward 
should adventure.'* Such winged 
words he spoke to his companions of 
the unpeopled world beyond that — 

" We of the oars made wings for our 

mad flight. 
Evermore gaining on the larboard side. 
Already all the stars of the other pole 
The night beheld, and ours so very low 
It did not rise above the ocean floor. 
Five times rekindled and as many quenched 
Had been the splendor underneath the 
moon, 

202 



Tennyson*s Ulysses 

Since we had entered into the deep pass, 

When there appeared to us a mountain, dim 

From distance, and it seemed to me so 

high 
As I had never any one beheld. 
Joyful were we, and soon it turned to 
weeping; 
For out of the new land a whirlwind 

rose. 
And smote upon the fore part of the 
ship. 
Three times it made it whirl with all the 
waters. 
At the fourth time it made the stern 

uplift. 
And the prow downward go, as pleased 
Another, 
Until the sea above us closed again." 

In Tennyson's as Dante's setting of 
the closing act of this drama of adven- 
ture, Ulysses exhorts his comrades to 
dare whatever fate has in store and 

follow knowledge beyond the outer- 
203 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

most star, and on the later as on the 
earlier sea the untiring adventurer 
pursues his quest ; type of the human 
spirit, formed not for ease and con- 
tent but for the eternal quest of 
experience. 

ULYSSES 

It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren 

crags, 
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and 

dole 
Unequal laws unto a savage race. 
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know 

not me. 

I cannot rest from travel : I will drink 
Life to the lees : all times I have enjoy'd 
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with 

those 
That loved me, and alone ; on shore, and 

when 
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
204 



Tennyson*s Ulysses 

Vext the dim sea : I am become a name ; 
For always roaming with a hungry heart, 
Much have I seen and known ; cities of 

men 
And manners, climates, councils, govern- 
ments. 
Myself not least, but honored of them all ; 
And drunk delight of battle with my peers. 
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 
I am a part of all that I have met ; 
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro* 
Gleams that untravel'd world, whose mar- 
gin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move. 
How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use ! 
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled 

on life 
Were all too little, and of one to me 
Little remains : But every hour is saved 
From that eternal silence, something more, 
A bringer of new things; and vile it were 
For some three suns to store and hoard 

myself. 
And this gray spirit yearning in desire 
205 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
Beyond the utmost bound of human 
thought. 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 
To whom I leave the scepter and the 

isle — 
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill 
This labor, by slow prudence to make 

mild 
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 
Subdue them to the useful and the good. 
Most blameless is he, centered in the 

sphere 
Of common duties, decent not to fail 
In offices of tenderness, and pay 
Meet adoration to my household gods. 
When I gone. He works his work, I 

mine. 

There lies the port ; the vessel pufFs 
her sail : 
There gloom the dark broad seas. My 
mariners, 

206 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and 

thought with me — 
That ever with a folic welcome took 
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I 

are old ; 
Old Age hath yet his honor and his toil ; 
Death closes all : but something ere the 

end. 
Some work of noble note, may yet be 

done. 
Not unbecoming men that strove with 

Gods. 
The lights begin to twinkle from the 

rocks : 
The long day wanes : the slow moon 

climbs : the deep 
Moans round with many voices. Come, 

my friends, 
'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose 

holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
207 



Tennyson's Ulysses 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us 

down : 
It may be we shall touch the Happy 

Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we 

knew. 
Tho* much is taken, much abides; and 

tho* 
We are not now that strength which in 

old days 
Moved earth and heaven ; that which we 

are, we are ; 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong 

in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 



208 



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